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Birds of a Feather
 Somebody says they are flying rats. Somebody else calls them government painters.
Another guy says he heard that they were the souls of lost sailors.
We are talking about gulls, and nearly everyone has a story at the weekly gathering of the ROMEOs (Retired Old Men Eating Out).
“I saw a herring gull up on Isle Royale take a guy’s steak
right off his grill,” says Mark Nyman, a captain with the Vista Fleet
who is neither old nor retired. “The steak was still hot, too, but the
gull brought it up on a nearby roof and ate it right in front of the
guy.”
Longtime Lake Superior boater and retired ad executive Donn
Larson takes it a step further. When a friend with a cottage at Silver
Islet lost a steak to a gull, the fellow hurled a brick at the bird -
and shattered the windshield of his new Cadillac.
Native Park Pointer Dave Poulin, a Minnesota Power retiree,
says there used to be a one-legged gull up Minnesota’s north shore that
everyone called Old Sam. Poulin says he has this image in his mind of
Old Sam, perched on one leg, the tail of a herring dangling from its
mouth.
The idiosyncrasies of gulls are typical of the weighty
matters aired with more length than depth every Friday when a dozen or
so denizens of the Duluth-Superior waterfront congregate for lunch. We
usually meet at Black Woods Grill & Bar on London Road and, because
things tend to get noisy or profane or both, we are sequestered in a
side room to avoid offending the establishment’s more housebroken
clientele.
A group of gulls is a colony; a group of retired
waterfront guys is, apparently, a gathering of ROMEOs, as the author
describes, and each ROMEO has his own colony of gull stories. Photo by
Capt. Tom Mackay
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This week’s discourse begins when someone brings up a story
about a gull that returns to a local motel every spring clamoring for a
handout. According to the motel manager, the bird knows that if it
makes enough racket, it will be appeased by a doughnut.
Motel personnel call the bird Steven Seagull, a play on the
actor’s name. Reminded me of a resident pigeon we had on the farm many
years ago: Walter.
Capt. Tom Mackay, who retired a year ago as Vista Fleet’s
senior captain, says our use of “seagull” bothers him because the
species that inhabit western Lake Superior are actually herring gulls
and ring-bills.
“In fact,” he says, “since the 1960s, the ring-bills have
taken over in the Duluth-Superior Harbor. The herring gulls were once
dominant, but you rarely see them now. Maybe it’s because the
ring-bills are so much more aggressive.”
(This did not seem to be a prudent time to suggest, as I am
prone to do, that gulls inside the bay could be called bay-gulls and
that across the lake at the Soo, you could have bay-gulls and locks.
But I digress, which I am also prone to do …)
Nyman says herring gulls are still in the majority up the
north shore. He says he’s fascinated by the three-act bird-and-fish
show that’s evolved since the heavy invasion of cormorants along the
shore.
“You can locate the herring by watching the cormorants. The
cormorants gather and begin to dive for the herring, but when they come
to the surface, the gulls - which have been watching - swoop down and
start pecking at the cormorants. The cormorants then drop the herring
and the gulls grab them up.”
Such practices square with a dictionary definition of “gull”
as a verb meaning to trick or defraud. Cormorants probably use the word
in a more literal sense, as in “ripped off.”
It seems reasonable to presume cormorants are, shall we say, gullible.
Gulls, meanwhile, can also be victims, sometimes
accidentally. Bob Hom, Duluth Entertainment Convention Center
operations director, says he was trolling with a Rapala about a foot
under the surface when a gull grabbed the lure.
“We had a struggle getting it into the boat - and even a
tougher time extricating the hook. The hook was in its beak - and
there’s no doubt it was a ring-bill because I was up close and
personal. But we got him unhooked and he seemed to be okay.”
I have my own gull story involving fishing line. When I was
with the Duluth Seaway Port Authority, we were preparing to pave a new
cargo yard at the Clure Public Marine Terminal and had tried without
success to clear away scores of gulls occupying the site. Noisemakers,
fake owls, colored plastic streamers - nothing worked.
The construction crew was due in a day or so and, based on a
tip we had from a West Coast contact, our property superintendent, Tom
Kennedy, bought a couple of reels of monofilament line. Kennedy strung
the line on posts around the property perimeter and ran some line
through the interior. Within hours, we had nary a bird in the
construction area, presumably because one of them struck the barely
visible fish line and word went out in gull-speak (Gullegian?) that
there was danger there. Call it gullepathy.
Ships and shipping are never far from any ROMEO’s
conversation, and Harlan Eggert, ex-submariner and retired Army Reserve
shop foreman, provides the segue in observing that “seagulls squawk,
eat, sh-- (relieve themselves) and are protected by the government -
just like sailors.”
Ignoring the slight to sailors, Fred Cummings, retired Great
Lakes Fleet superintendent and a longtime chief mate, says gulls seem
to have something against ship sanitation. He says they were a constant
problem years ago when the company still designated a vessel as the
flagship.
“The flagship had to be absolutely spotless for special
events and for special guests. But as soon as we’d get things clean,
the gulls would come along and make a mess. We tried everything to keep
them away. Sometimes we’d get colored plastic strips and hang them all
around. That would work for a few days, but then the gulls would figure
it out and they’d be messing all over the place again.”
Gulls are no longer a big problem on Great Lakes vessels, at
least when they’re under way, Cummings says, because food scraps and
other waste are no longer thrown overboard.
“Nothing goes over the side today. You used to have a string
of gulls follow you all the way across the lake, but not any more. That
might be one of the reasons you see so many today at Canal Park.”
It is at about this point when someone says he likes to watch gulls at Canal Park during a big nor’easter.
“One time,” he says, “the wind was blowing so hard that I saw one gull lay the same egg three times.”
There is some wisdom in the restaurant’s decision to segregate the ROMEOs from other diners.
This issue’s Journal writer:
Few
have a better background than Davis Helberg to tell stories about the
colorful characters of Lake Superior’s waterfront. Davis was a Great
Lakes sailor at 17, then a vessel agent, newspaper reporter, port
public relations director, pilot dispatcher and stevedoring manager
before his appointment as executive director of the Duluth Seaway Port
Authority in 1979. He retired in 2003, making him, finally, a
legitimate ROMEO.
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