After many weeks of waiting, I was finally able to make it out to shoot at sunrise. I had heard that there were Flamingos in the area and I was really hoping to photograph one in the wild. Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side today. But that’s okay, I’m just glad I was able to get out and do some photography.

There was a large amount of Black Skimmers, Plovers, Sandpipers and other small shore birds. It was a great morning overall and I want to share one of my favorite parts.

While I was focused on the Black Skimmers, I heard some squawking. I looked over toward my left and saw that a gull had caught a fish. Now, unbeknownst to the gull, there was a Brown Pelican standing directly behind it. The pelican started charging at the gull, the gull dropped the fish and quickly waddled out of the way.

[Forewarning- I really tend to anthropomorphize animals. I can’t stop myself from imagining them having conversations or relating their behaviors to those of humans.]

The pelican then scooped up the fish. The seagull continued squawking, almost as if saying, “Hey, that’s my fish! This isn’t fair! Drop it!”. The pelican was unfazed and continued attempting to eat the fish. Now, I say attempting, because it looked like it was an extraordinarily difficult task to get this fish down.

After a few minutes, the pelican was able to swallow the fish.

So, following this debacle, after the pelican successfully stole and ate a fish that belonged to a seagull, it appeared to be escorted off the premises by another seagull (or the same one, sorry, I can’t gulls apart).