Search This Blog

Sunday, August 12, 2018

A Seagull's Work Around to a Cooling Center


When the heat index is predicted to be dangerously high, New York City opens cooling centers in air-conditioned facilities to offer people relief from the heat, but since seagulls don't have access to such places, they have their own methods of getting relief from the heat, which is something I learned on a recent trip (this past Thursday) to Long Beach.

I had gone there in hopes of observing American Oystercatchers, a shorebird featured in volume two (ISBN 9780996378536)of my Words In Our Beak book series (pictured below) but there didn't seem to be any of them in sight. 

SEE PRESS RELEASE

It was an extremely hot day, which may have been the reason for their absence, for I have encountered them during the days of August in bygone years. I'm not sure of this creature's ability to tolerate the heat, but I did notice (thanks to the long lens on my camera) that a ring-billed gull was standing on the sand with an open bill (as evidenced in the image atop this entry).

At first I thought the bird was begging to be fed which is a habit of young birds (not adults such as the ones I saw) and, indeed that may have been part of the creature's motive, however, as I continued to see the gulls walking about with an open bill, I wondered what the reason for this could be. 



During my many trips to the beach and numerous encounters with seagulls, I'd never come upon this, so when I returned home I did some research and discovered that "they pant, like dogs which releases heat through evaporation of moisture along the bird's mouth, throat and lungs." 

Additionally, "because birds lack sweat glands, they do not sweat to cool off like we do. A bird will open its mouth and breath faster, which increases the airflow."

It seems another way this bird variety cools off is by "splashing around in the water to cool themselves" and by ruffling and raising "their body feathers so hot air close to the skin can escape" (as evidenced in the next picture).


Birds with lighter plumage will face those light-colored feathers towards the sun to reflect heat away from their bodies, which seems to be what the adult and young seagulls are doing in the following set of pictures.




I continue to be awestruck by the survival skills that birds have under their wing.

FALL 2018 ADDENDUM: 

Hardcover versions of Volume One, Two and Three can be found wherever books are sold.

MY BOOK SERIES


Please click here to go to my blog post that provides details as to where you can get these books. Additionally, I have rendered some images from these books into other formats and they are available via Fine Art America (FAA). Some of my other photographs (Black & White CollectionKaleidoscopic Images and the famous Mandarin duck who visited NYC) can also be found on my FAA pages.

ADDENDUM SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER 2021:

When the third volume of the hard-cover version of Words In Our Beak was released, I withdrew from promoting my former versions of Words In Our Beak. 

The very first one is an iBook and went into Apple's book store in 2015.


This was followed by an ePub version...


..that is available on Amazon and was also published in 2015.

Subsequently, Words In Our Beak's digital versions were published as a soft-cover book (with slight variations) by MagCloud in 2017.


Its press release can be read by clicking here.  [The press release does note my Kindle version of the digital Words In Our Beak, but I withdrew it from Amazon a few years ago and at this time, I do not intend to make it live again.]

Now with the release of BIRD TALES....


... I've been advised to make mention of my early versions of volume one of Words In Our Beak, they do vary ever so slightly in content from the hard-cover version of volume one.

As of this addendum, I do not intend to create digital or soft-cover versions of Words In Our Beak Volume Two or Words In Our Beak Volume Three.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.