By Michael
Burke on March 30, 2018
We had traveled to Cambridge, MD,
to look for late winter waterfowl on the Choptank River, but instead I found
myself looking at one of the true harbingers of spring.
No, it wasn’t a robin — many of
which overwinter right here in Maryland. My gaze was fixed on a laughing
gull (Leucophaeus atricilla), the raucous seagull that is an integral
part of any summer beach scene on the East Coast, and a real springtime
migrant.
We were in the parking lot of the
Waterfront Park, and the gulls outnumbered the cars on that blustery March day
last year. They were mostly ring-billed gulls, but four laughing gulls were
there to announce the imminent arrival of spring.
Laughing gulls start to arrive in Maryland in mid-March annually. The biggest influx occurs in mid-April.
They arrive in the Chesapeake
watershed already wearing their distinctive all-black heads.
Laughing gulls mate in late
spring, incubate their eggs for three weeks and tend to their young for another
month until they fledge.
By mid– to late-July, a new
generation is on its way, and the parents begin to molt into their “winter”
plumage, and the black hood gives way to a white head with smudged patches of
gray. It takes the brown juveniles three years to reach their adult
colors.
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