Gull Attack

A beautiful morning after an overnight temperature of 2C took us along the coast track towards Dunrobin Castle and to our favourite bench where we often sit to look out across the Moray Firth. It's a good place for watching sea birds as there is both a sandy beach and an extensive area of seaweed-covered rocks, a place where the local gulls congregate....

....to do what gulls spend much of their time doing.... nothing.... unless, of course, there's a suggestion of food being available, in which case there is....

....sudden and considerable excitement.

It took us some minutes to work out what was happening. The gulls had found a pair of guillemots and several cormorants fishing together in shallow water by the old stone slipway, against which they were pushing them so....

....they could attack them and steal the fish they had caught - look very carefully and you'll see that the cormorant at right has a small fish in its mouth.

The attacks were quite brutal, this unfortunate cormorant being....

....forced underwater by a gull.

These intimidatory tactics are exactly the same as the gulls use on any humans foolish enough to allow them to see that they have some fish - in the form of a fish-and-chips meal.

Along with crows, we have far too many gulls in residence along the front in Golspie - but humans are certainly not the only species which would be pleased to see their numbers reduce.