OK, So It's Not The Coolest Video EVER, But Still....

I spent the first 20 minutes or so just watching this bird, paralleling us on the ferry, seemingly not even moving. Then, without moving his wings, he'd dart forward (we were near the stern), hang out there for a bit, and then loop around and come back. By the time I got the bright idea to take video instead of just still pictures, he'd done this loop several times. He got close enough that we could reach out and touch him--no doubt he was expecting food.

Watch the 1:20 video here, courtesy of former student Ronnie. Thanks, Ron!

(PS It's about 10.3MB so may take a minute or so to load)

Update, 8/25/05, 4:38 pm: I guess I should give some background on the video. I took it while on the MV Coho, the ferry that runs a few times a day between Victoria, British Columbia, and Port Angeles, Washington. It was near the end of the Canada trip (obviously!) and we took the 6:30 ferry out of Victoria (it actually left about a half an hour late). The stern looks dead in this video--that's because for the first 20 minutes I was trying to take still photos of this gull, like about a dozen or more other people. After they got their pictures they went back out of the wind, and only then, almost alone on the deck, did I get the bright idea to try the video function on my new Olympus D-590Zoom digital camera. What you see here is the result.

You can tell from the sound and the smoke from the smokestack that it was pretty windy. Not long after I took that video we were in a fogbank, with visibility less than 100 meters. We didn't break from that bank until we were close to the shore in Port Angeles.

Update, 6/14/07: That link no longer works. But thanks to technological improvements at Blogger, perhaps you can see the video at the end of this post!