In perpetual flight, I brush against life
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Dates2021 - 2021
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Author
Shooting on seagulls, Sardinia summer 2021
I love gulls because gulls are excellent flyers, adept at exploiting air currents to conserve energy. The Mediterranean herring gull (Larus michahellis) has a fascinating behavioural and feeding plasticity that allows them to benefit from the resources provided by man. Having evolved as an ichthyophagous marine species, we now see them feeding in rubbish tips and eating bread thrown into the water.
The common gull is a highly gregarious species, nesting, feeding and resting in very large groups. The light colour of its plumage (light grey) facilitates contact. When a gull identifies a food source it will be easily spotted and reached by other individuals precisely because of its colour, which is highly communicative. The chick of the herring gull recognises the red spot on its mother's beak as the arrival of food and instinctively taps it with its beak to receive nourishment.
In Indian mythology, the seagull is "he who possesses the light". It is in a similar sense that Richard Bach talks about this bird in his novel Jonathan Livingston: here, in fact, the flight of the seagull becomes a metaphor for the joy of living and the search for an intimate and profound contact with nature and with one's own potential.