Laughing Gulls Try To Steal Fish From Brown Pelicans

  

A laughing gull landed right on top of this brown pelican.

I have seen laughing gulls drop down onto the backs of pelicans and try to grab fish as they fall from the edges of the pelicans’ pouches.   

 

Sometimes fish do escape from a pelican’s mouth.

 

A pelican will fly high over the beach scanning for movement and then dive quickly down into the water, scooping up small fish in its pouch. Then it will lift its head to drain the seawater out of the sides of its pouch before swallowing its catch. That’s the moment when the laughing gull will try to snatch a fish.

  

A laughing gull needs to get very close to the pelican’s pouch to check for dropped fish.

 

I learned a catchy name for this behavior – kleptoparasitism. 

 

The laughing gulls can be quite intrusive but pelicans are large birds, and an angry pelican can deliver a sharp bite with the hook at the end of its beak – though not when its mouth is full.

 

A pelican mostly uses its pouch like a fishing net.

 

And when a laughing gull approaches from behind, it is hard for the pelican to get the gull off its back.  

Sometimes it looks like the laughing gull is getting into a mating position.

 

One passive pelican defensive strategy is to just keep its mouth closed until the laughing gull gets bored and goes away. 

 

  

 Are they sharing feelings?

 

Another pelican strategy is to make itself look a big crazy turtle.  

 

 

 A laughing gull will eventually get fed up.

 

I find it hard to understand why the laughing gulls don’t just go catch their own fish. Are they just being lazy? 

 

Maybe, but this behavior actually seems to be an evolved strategy. A pelican can dive deeper and get more fish than a laughing gull. So a laughing gull that is able to get some of the pelican’s fish without too much trouble can be more successful – eating better, conserving its energy, and having more time for mating, nesting, or defending its territory. 

In the spring, laughing gulls often are busy mating on top of buoys.

 

It is actually not just laughing gulls that try to steal fish. I once saw a huge frigatebird at Maho Bay attack a small tern sitting on a buoy until it gave up the fish in its mouth. That was a violent form of theft. Also, up north, bald eagles will grab fish from ospreys in a mid-air display of their superior strength.  

 

The laughing gulls can’t take a fish from the pelican by force so, while annoying, they are probably not really scary. And, to an observer, they do look pretty funny riding on the pelicans. 

 

A waiting game

Kapok Seeds Fly Off in Fluff Balls

 

Fuzzy kapok fluff contains small seeds. 

After witnessing the weeks-long spectacle of a kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) attracting a mob of bats to pollinate its flowers (see my May 17, 2025, VI Source article if you missed it), I kept going back to see what would happen next. 

 

After the bats come to eat the nectar inside the flowers, and consequently spread the pollen around to other flowers, the flowers fall off. Then the kapok tree’s seeds begin developing inside the cup-like structures where the ovaries are located. 

The spaces left where flowers fall are soon filled with developing seed pods.

  

 

Since there are lots of flowers on the tree, and they aren’t all pollinated at once, some of the seed pods start growing sooner than others. At first, the pod is green and looks like a tiny zucchini. When it gets bigger, the pod turns brown and hard. 

Successfully pollinated flowers go on to produce seed pods. 

 

 

I kept going back to see how the pods were developing but it was many weeks before I saw any of them opening up. Eventually they started cracking open lengthwise, and I could see rows forming inside that from a distance looked like kernels of corn growing on the cob.

 

The expanding fibers around the seeds pushed open the pods.

 

  

After the pod’s hardened skin dropped off, you could see that the ‘kernels’ were actually soft. Soon wisps of the compressed fibers started getting loose as the wind caught them.  

The fibers around the seeds kept expanding once they were free of the pod.

 

 

For a while the tree looked like it was decorated with round puff balls. While many other types of trees get their seeds distributed by producing tasty fruits for birds and animals to eat and deliver to another spot that might be favorable for germination and growth, the kapok trees instead send their seeds floating off on fluffy parachutes. 

The kapok tree didn’t use up its energy growing new leaves until the seed development process was over. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the fibers got fuzzier and kept expanding and getting looser, some of them kept their ‘kernel’ shape, just growing bigger and softer. Later, they lost it entirely and completely unraveled. Then you could see that there were small, dark seeds attached to the fibers. Because of these fibers, the tree is also sometimes called a ‘silk cotton’ tree.  

 

 A light waxy layer on the kapok fluff makes it shiny and water repellent.

 

 

For many years the kapok fibers were prized by people for use in life jackets and life preservers because they are very light and buoyant and do not absorb water. At the same time, the fluffy fibers trap air, so they retain heat and are useful for insulation and bedding. Over time, people started using synthetic substitutes, but there has been some interest in kapok again as a natural, non-allergenic fiber.   

 

The primary purpose of the light-weight fluff, however, is to transport the little seeds through the air to a space far away from the mother tree where another such huge tree could possibly grow and thrive.   

 

Unfortunately for many of the seeds, and the homeowners nearby, much of the fluff ends up just falling close to the tree, on top of other trees and bushes, or smothering the existing ground cover plants.  

Globs of fallen fluff can end up covering the ground and other plants.

 

I hope that some of the seeds do reach a good place for them to grow, so there can be more of these wonderful trees around to support local wildlife, and to delight human observers as well. 

Viewing Seabirds on Offshore Cays with St. John Students

 

The students got a close look at a Royal Tern sitting on a post in Cruz Bay. 

Third graders from Gift Hill School had a chance to check out summer seabirds congregating around Congo Cay, Lovango and Carvel Rock through a V.I. Audubon Society program supporting education about local birds. The school bird program just began this year and is expected to soon include classes in other grades and schools. 

Last summer the third-grade teacher, Mrs. Wallace, attended a Birds Sleuth training course offered by the BirdsCaribbean network and then put together a curriculum plan appropriate for her students. 

V.I. Audubon board member Laurel Brannick was the trip leader. Laurel served as a National Park Ranger on St. John for 30 years before retiring, and now offers regular Friday morning bird walks at Francis Bay, as well as Thursday evening slide shows at Cinnamon Bay Campgrounds. 

I went along on the boat trip to try to get photos of the migratory birds that come to the small islands off St. John during the summer months to make their nests.  

In April, we usually start seeing black-headed Laughing Gulls arriving along the beaches of St. John from other areas in the Caribbean. They are attracted by the abundance of small fry fish at this time of year, and the relative safety of the uninhabited offshore islands for nesting. 

Laughing Gulls 

In May, the gulls are joined by flocks of graceful Roseate Terns with mostly black bills. 

Roseate Terns 

Sometimes the Laughing Gulls and Roseate Terns hang out together to fish along St. John shorelines. 

Laughing Gull sharing a rock with three Roseate Terns 

Soon, however, both types of birds start thinking about nesting, and then the Roseate Terns try to stay away from the Laughing Gulls, concerned about attacks on their chicks. 

Roseate Terns nesting on cliff on Congo Cay

Close to the top of Carvel Rock we also spotted other related nesting seabirds I hadn’t seen before – Bridled Terns.  

Bridled Terns rarely come close to the shore of St. John

The highlight of the trip for me was when Laurel pointed out a couple of birds flying way up in the clouds and said she thought they were tropicbirds. These have been sort of mythical birds for me because I had never seen them on St. John, even though some people have reported seeing them from boats or flying around the rocky cliffs.  

The birds Laurel pointed out looked like large terns with just the slightest trace of the long ribbon-like tails the tropicbirds are known for. I took a couple of shots with my telephoto lens, but didn’t have high hopes for good results given their distance from us, the cloudiness of the day and the rocking boat. Still, I did manage to get an image of what seemed to be a Red-billed Tropicbird, which made my day. 

Red-billed Tropicbirds are more common here than the white-tailed ones. 

I probably enjoyed the boat trip more than anyone, because I was able to use my camera lens to zoom in on the birds. But the students did get a chance to see the remote places where seabirds hang out around St. John, and maybe will want to learn more about what the birds are doing out there. One of the students remarked on the beauty of the undeveloped cliffs along Congo Cay, and Laurel emphasized how important it is to preserve at least some spaces just for birds and other wildlife.