{"id":5561,"date":"2015-11-11T12:15:43","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T20:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/larryeifert.com\/?p=5561"},"modified":"2015-11-11T12:15:43","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T20:15:43","slug":"my-48-north-magazine-story-for-the-month-a-dancing-gull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/2015\/11\/my-48-north-magazine-story-for-the-month-a-dancing-gull\/","title":{"rendered":"My 48 North Magazine Story for the Month – A Dancing Gull"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2015-11-Dancing-Gull\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After watching a little song-and-dance on the beach, I wrote this for my monthly page in 48 North magazine.<\/a>\u00a0You can read it online at their website too.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s the text for the story:<\/p>\n

A recent beach walk showed us something we\u2019d never seen. Meandering along a sandy stretch that had just a gentle bit of wave action, we joined a glaucous-winged gull (the most common gull in the Salish Sea) who was walking here too. It seemed to know exactly what it was doing \u2013 looking for something right where the little waves were breaking. Soon it stopped, turned to face the incoming water and started doing a little dance. Dabble, dabble, dabble it went for about 20 seconds, turning slightly but keeping it up. As each wave came in, the gull used the rushing water to prance ever deeper into the sand \u2013 and then it looked down – and began to grab the mole crabs and other small burrowing crustaceans it had forced to the surface in the wash zone.<\/p>\n

Mole crabs like to bury themselves right at the tide line where food is abundant. They sense when the tide is receding and slowly follow it out, a few feet at a time. This young gull had learned the crab\u2019s ritual and realized that just a little dance, up and down, left and right \u2013 and lunch would magically appear. We watched it long enough to realize that it was nothing but normal for this smart bird, and then wondered why all the other gulls didn\u2019t do this too. Maybe it was evolution happening right before our eyes. Most of the time, watching nature isn\u2019t seeing a giant whale surface or an eagle dive on a salmon, but it\u2019s the small rewards of seeing daily lives of creatures that share our world that is normal \u2013 if you\u2019ve smart enough to see them.<\/p>\n

\n

I took a couple of phone videos of this little guy dancing along at the surf line. Click to see one here<\/a>\u00a0on YouTube. \u00a0Sorry, it’s a bit shakey in the wind but you can still see the little guy dancing away while Nancy does commentary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks for reading this week. My big mural is coming along just fine. Next post I’ll show you how it’s going.
\nLarry Eifert<\/p>\n

Here’s the blog on the web.<\/a>\u00a0And here’s my Facebook fan page<\/a>. I post lots of other stuff there.<\/p>\n

Click <\/a>here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.<\/p>\n

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs<\/a><\/p>\n

And\u00a0here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.<\/a> Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After watching a little song-and-dance on the beach, I wrote this for my monthly page in 48 North magazine.\u00a0You can read it online at their website too. Here’s the text for the story: A recent beach walk showed us something we\u2019d never seen. Meandering along a sandy stretch that had just a gentle bit of … Continue reading My 48 North Magazine Story for the Month – A Dancing Gull<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,92,112,125],"class_list":["post-5561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-published-story","tag-48-north-magazine","tag-port-townsend","tag-stories-and-articles","tag-wildlife"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/2015-11-Dancing-Gull.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5561"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5590,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561\/revisions\/5590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larryeifert.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}