On a recent drive from New York City to Boston, we made a stop in Cape Cod to take in the beautiful New England scenery. Loads of nice houses, pleasant people and certainly no shortage of the aforementioned scenery. In a seemingly hopeless search for a beach (we circled a bit and indulged in a bit of head scratching) we ended up in several locations, including the Martha’s Vineyard ferry terminal. Note to Self: On returning to Cape Cod, spend a few hours in the Vineyard…
After finally finding a beach and seeing the utterly befuddling sight of ice meeting sand, we took the opportunity to get rid of some utterly shocking excuses for biscuits. Lemon crunchy things that although not fit for human consumption, seemed to meet with the standards of the nearby seagulls. As if by magic, like they could hear the packet opening, there were dozens of them overhead, waiting to see what was for lunch.
Given that I had barely used my heaviest lens (the 70-200 IS) and also due to the fact that I’d been to B&H Photo a day earlier to pick up a 1.4x teleconverter for the lens, I felt it behooved me to try the thing out. These are the results. Some, as in much of my photography, are out of focus, poorly framed or just plain nonsense. If you notice a difference in processing also it’s down to the fact that I’m currently trying out Adobe Lightroom on another recent acquisition, my 17″ macbook pro. The whole thing still confuses me greatly.
Anyway, back on track. I took a few of the biscuits, cracked them into pieces and scattered them lovingly on the ice in front of where I was standing on the pier. There was a sheet of ice a good 60/70′ long, stretching from the shoreline out almost into the middle of the river and it was like that for the entire length of the shore. A cautious seagull slipped and slided his way over to one of the fragments of nasty biscuit as I almost literally rolled around the pier laughing. As if it couldn’t get any funnier, a few of the airborne birds then decided they had to get a piece of this and deftly dove toward the water to get a bite. Only it wasn’t water, was it?
On realising their error, they pulled up steeply, wishing to avoid a head on collision with the solid ice. A couple managed to pull off this daring maneuver; The rest hit the ice with a thud, slid across it’s smooth surface (completely past the biscuit they’re after in the first place) and then tried to get back to the spot before anyone else got to the food. There was mayhem of biblical proportions. The rest of the birds joined in (a good 30 or 40 seagulls) and began crashing into each other as they tried to land on or walk around on the ice. At this stage, all three of us so called adults were doubled over laughing at the unfortunate creatures trying to claw their way around for a taste of a lemony cookie.
We finally ran out of food and broke the last couple of biscuits into pieces and flung the bits onto the ice. It seemed the confused and disorientated animals resorted to violence of the utmost order (as seagulls normally do) and the whole thing descended into a frenzy of pecking, pulling, head butting and slapping. We took our leave, fearing that any minute an animal welfare officer might arrive and arrest us all for seagull taunting. What I was more worried about though (given that we were in the U.S.) is that a particularly street smart gull would attempt to sue us for damages. Needless to say, we drove away at speed…
(some more; flickr)