By Julie Zickefoose
Excerpted from BWD Magazine, Jan/Feb 2024
It’s 5 pm on December 27, 2022, and I’m headed into my local Walmart, head down, reusable grocery bags in hand. The fresh produce Walmart sources is often the best I can get in my small Ohio town, and I need good produce in these short, dark days. I’m glancing up to note in which row I’ve parked when an adult ring-billed gull bears directly at me in low and somewhat labored flight. There’s a man in a plaid flannel shirt walking abreast of me, about 10’ away. To our astonishment, the gull flies neatly in between us at waist level, beating its wings steadily but staying so low that I could have leaned over and snatched it out of the air in my arms, had I not been gaping like a goldfish at its thrillingly close approach.
“Well hello there!” I say, unable to voice anything more intelligent. I have seen the pupil of its lemon eye, noted the fine winter streaking on its head and neck, the black ring around its bill tip, its immaculate cloud-gray upperparts. Still shocked to have been nearly brushed by this beautiful bird’s right wingtip, I spin on my heel to watch it proceed down Row 7. It’s flying with purpose, I note, clearly hurrying. It’s aiming for a white SUV that’s backing out of a parking space. I’m consumed with curiosity. What is this bird’s mission? Just as the gull reaches the vehicle, it fans its tail and wings and swoops up, landing lightly on the roof. The operator, unaware that they’ve picked up a passenger, shifts into drive and heads for the exit lane. As the SUV slows and turns left, the gull wobbles and throws out a wing for balance. “Hitchin’ a ride…” the man beside me comments, then turns and walks toward the store. Well yes, but…what??
I am no longer headed for the store. I am moving as if zapped by a cattle prod, running across the rows, neck craned to its highest, watching this scene unfold. The white car stops, then turns right to join the flow of traffic toward Rt. 7, a busy four-lane thoroughfare that cuts through Marietta. Oh, how I wish I had my car binoculars, but who expects to be grazed by a gull on the way into the store? Straining my eyes, I can still make out a white dot riding on the rear roof as the SUV makes its way into traffic. In the gathering dark, I finally lose sight of it, but I know the gull has ridden at least a half-mile onto Route 7, and it’s probably headed downtown on its chosen ride.
Ring-billed gulls show up in this water-rimmed town at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers only in late December and early January, when it gets cold enough to mostly freeze waterways and sometimes the shallower parts of Lake Erie, a four-hour drive north. Little flocks of Bonaparte’s gulls and a smattering of herring and great black-backed gulls come with them. Ringbills commute en masse from the rivers to the parking lots and fast-food dumpsters, looking for food in the litter that always follows humans. It is an inelegant way of life for these elegant birds. This is one of the first ringbills I’ve spotted this season, made all the more remarkable by its strange behavior.
As an avian rehabilitator and longtime bird observer, I immediately noticed two things about this gull in the few minutes I had it in view. First and most obvious was its very low altitude and its subtly labored wingbeat.
No wild gull with a choice would ever take a flight path in between two humans, at their waist level and close enough to be grabbed. The bird obviously very much wanted to get atop the SUV that it saw backing out before it pulled away, and it took the most direct route, between two bystanders. But why would it want to land on a car?
Watching its flight and the difficulty with which it maintained even slight altitude, and especially its final flare and swoop to land atop the car, I could see the gull was compromised. Furthermore, because it was able to fly at all, I could guess that it had not a broken wing, but a broken coracoid. The coracoid is a bony strut deep inside a bird’s breast that attaches to the keel, which is the enormous shield-shaped breastbone where the large flight muscles are anchored. The coracoid supports the flight muscles, especially those that execute the upstroke. When it suffers a broken or unstable coracoid, a bird feels pain on the upstroke and has trouble gaining altitude. The gull looked perfect from the outside, and technically was capable of flight, but I could see that all wasn’t right.
And so, being a gull, which is to say a keenly intelligent opportunist, the little ringbill did what it had to—it hitched a ride on a car. Not so different, as I thought about it, from its landing on a boat to get from A to B, which is something that would hardly elicit comment from any mariner. Seeing that fragile bird riding shakily atop a car, though, was a whole different thing, fraught with danger. Watching the car enter the traffic stream and accelerate to perhaps 30 mph, knowing there was an injured, web-footed gull somehow clinging to its roof, did something to my heart. The gull was likely looking to catch a ride to the next big parking lot, just as a human would hail an Uber. And it did it of necessity, because it knew it could never fly there on its own.
An odd mix of helplessness and pathos flooded over me. The passerby who also found the bird’s behavior odd enough for comment had proceeded on into the store. There was no other witness to this bird’s ingenuity and bravery but me, and I doubt the thought that the bird was compromised had even crossed his mind.
As long as I watch them, birds never stop showing me the evidence of their deep intelligence, their grasp of cause and effect, and their ability to plan for future rewards. Omnivores like corvids and gulls are among the most intelligent of birds, but no one, to my knowledge, has expended the experimental energy on gulls that has been lavished on testing the intelligence of various corvids. No wonder crows and ravens are so famous for problem-solving and complex, goal-oriented behavior. We have bothered to gather the evidence to demonstrate their brilliance. This incident was a humbling reminder to me to never overlook the intellect—some might call it divinity– in all beings. Yes, ring-billed gulls tussle and scavenge for smashed French fries, but know this: there is a fine brain and a higher intelligence at work in each one. As the car and its quick-thinking passenger disappeared in the gathering dark, I wished hard that I could take it into care for a few weeks, until that small but essential strut healed. But it was already gone, on its way, hitchin’ a ride.