Immature Pacific Gull

 Early one calm overcast late autumn morning I found a surf fisher and his young daughter on the ocean beach at Lake Bunga - a short distance east of Lakes Entrance - surrounded by thirty Silver Gulls and one immature Pacific Gull (1).  I counted the gulls while recording birds for a Birdata survey. The close gathering of gulls indicated food was on offer. 

I had just counted the gulls when the Pacific Gull broke from the crowd of Silver Gulls and flew to the shoreline below where I was standing. Several Silver Gulls followed the larger Pacific Gull which had scavenged the tail end of a fish discarded by the fisher (2).  

The following time order sequence of photos shows the Pacific Gull trying to swallow the choice morsel while closely attended by two ever hopeful Silver Gulls.

NOTE: You can left click on any photo to open a slide show of the photos free of text or a right click enables one photo at a time to be opened in a New Tab where an enlarged version can be viewed.

The next shot captures the fish being dropped – a chance for the Silver Gulls to wrest the food item from the Pacific Gull.

The fish tail was quickly recovered.

Though covered in sand the Pacific Gull starts to swallow the food.

However it aborted this attempt and moved into the water where it washed the sand off.

Free of sand, the Pacific Gull now has another attempt to swallow the fish tail.

Finally after one minute from the first photo the food item is going down.

Birds always swallow fish head-first for obvious reasons. I am not sure if sand is always removed by washing. By-catch and discarded bait from human fishing, amateur or commercial, is a significant source of food for many seabirds.

Notes:

(1) The Pacific Gull fledges as a juvenile bird with dark brown feathers and bill and then moults head feathers first, which become white. The bill retains a dark tip but the rest changes to a bone colour. It takes five years to reach full adult plumage. 

(2) The fish was most likely an Australian Salmon.