From within the observation booth, out above the water, I saw two wonderful new birds today.
The first was like a slender white gull with a back so pale and grey it looked blue, a beak so pale and yellow it looked pink, a white, white body and long white wings with bright black tips, like they've been dipped in an inkwell.
This is a moyevka (моевка). In English it is called "kittiwake".
What I saw it do, besides look a lot like a seagull but much, much prettier, was glide above the water, facing the wind, without once moving it's wings, and skim the surface just ever so barely with the tip of its beak.
When it rose to fly away, it took a half-dozen strong flaps of the wings, turned, and glided away, with the wind at it's back, drawing two fine straight lines with the inky tips of it's wings, like the twin tips of a fountain-pen in an unspeakably steady drafter's hand.
The second had a black back and a white belly and a round head and a narrow beak. There were two of them, floating merrily on their broad white bellies, winking away and reappearing. By the time I had more or less sighted them and zoomed in with my all too inadequate push-the-camera-against-the-telescope technology, in very sudden huff they lifted out of the water, quite vertically, as if they were being lifted by the scruffs of their necks. With their black heads, backs, triangular wings, and broad white bellies, they reminded me of something but I knew not what.
This bird is the kaira (кайра) or thick-billed murre.
When I went to the colony where the moyevka and the kaira live, and I saw these very vertical, puffed up birds with their black suits, I felt, once again, that I should know what they remind me of.
It was when they started falling of their roosts, some 30, 40 feet in the air, and flopping on their bellies in the water that the answer occured to me. Kairas are penguins, only slimmer - and they fly.
The moyevka-kittiwakes and kaira-murres live together in a colony on a cliff not too far from the observation booth. It is a noisy, busy place. Very noisy. Very busy. Very poopy. As with the sealion rookery, your eye does not at first know what to look at. Just great clumpings of black backs, white bellies, grey wings, squacks all a-teeming on the vertical face of the cliff.
Though, after a while, you notice that most of the activity, and certainly the bulk of the noise, is due to the moyevka. These are busy, fretful, industrious birds. They build nests with grasses gathered from the hills, they preen themselves, they make love and they bicker with their spouses, they sckwack at their neighbors, they wheel off the cliff and off onto the water.
The kaira-murres, on the other hand, as far as I can tell, do a lot of standing around, facing the cliff and looking up. No nest building, no bickering, no wheeling around, just standing straight up and looking up at the wall. Birds being a particularly antsy being, the kaira naturally fidgets, and puffs out, and spreads it's wings, and turns its head. But mostly it just stands there and looks up at the wall. Why? I don't know. I can't tell. I can't even hypothesize. It's just what they do. Still, it's notable that two birds with such different temperaments share the same habitat.
Why does the active, constructive, gliding, generally horizontal, pale-backed, loud, yellow-beaked, surface-skimming moyevka share the same habitat as the black-backed, black-beaked, very vertical, staring-up-at-the-wall-with-a-little-fidgeting, belly-flopping, diving kaira?
Why does the flashy, stoic, strong-flapping, dive-fishing, burrowing toporik shares the same space as the dull-grey, nervous, pukey, semi-gliding, surface-foraging gloopish?
Something there is in nature, I think, that likes complements. Not a very quantitative statement, but there it is.*
