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[Untitled Fri May 13 2022 173039 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)]

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For my original art I utilized my abilities as an (amateur) photographer and photographed my subject matter: a gull and a source of climate change, being a giant cloud of smoke from a presumably man-made fire.

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In order to answer my Critical Question I scanned through 4 different articles and a few smaller sources. I also used my already pretty extensive knowledge of the birds to help me out. With that being said I learned a few different things about the animals I didn’t previously know and the answer to my CQ ended up not being what I initially expected.

I went into this assignment inspired by the ongoing hybridization of North Pacific gulls that displaces the parent species. Shockingly, I discovered that to not actually be all too important to my project, as (although this info was hard to come by) it was found that in the most direct sense climate change may not be causing the rise of the hybrid birds, but rather that the hybrids are simply more successful than the parent species and outcompete them. It’s possible that climate change initially caused the birds to take to interspecies breeding in the first place, but there is no definitive answer there and it may have more to do with human refuse such as landfill dumps artificially spreading their range anyways. What I did end up finding in regards to CC’s (Climate Change’s) impact on the birds instead had less to do with hybrids and more to do with a shocking decrease in their numbers. The thing that ended up surprising me most about this assignment was coming to terms with the fact that the birds’ success in a human-dominated world may be way overstated. Turns out, although the gulls thrive in cities, when it comes time to nest they have trouble finding the normally nutritious marine meals they’d normally feed their chicks, and take either to scavenging refuse in compensation, or in extreme cases, cannibalizing on their own young.

And the plight of the birds in certain locales also proved to often be detrimental to the natural ecosystems they come from. In Coastal cities around the Bay Area, a sharp inflation in the numbers of California gulls, who had to abandon their previous home in Mono Lake after it had been drained of its water, had caused some issues for the local nesting shorebirds. California least terns and snowy plovers struggled in the wake of gull predation on their nests until action was taken by the regional district to scare the birds off of delicate nesting ground. Further down the coast, down to San Diego and the Channel Islands, the urbanized diets of western gulls may harm the island ecosystems they nest on. Normally seabird guano (droppings) promotes healthy growth of local Flora, but the gull’s now largely trash-centered diet feeds unhealthy chemicals into the soil, which may later on harm the island’s plant growth and disrupt the natural balance of the food web.

Ultimately the path most of these birds are going down ties back to a central starting point, us. The food we feed them, directly or indirectly, promotes gross chemicals to enter the environment. The changes we make to their ecosystems force the birds to find food in places they used to rarely have to go to, such as endangered bird nests and landfill. And through all of that they’re simply labeled as “trash birds” that should be taken care of and removed from our coastal cities, when the truth is they’re a “monster” that WE made. Perhaps the gulls then serve as a warning for us to clean up our act and take better care of the environment.

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This is a juvenile Olympic gull (western gull X glaucous-winged gull) seen by me personally. As the climate warms certain gull species come into contact more often, leading to many hybrids such as this bird. In the case of one of the parent species, the glaucous-winged gull, it has nearly gone extinct around the bay area. Instead it is directly replaced by hybrids forged from many different related species. The cause of frequent hybridization isn't entirely clear, but it's thought that hybrid birds often take the best traits of either species which leads to them outcompeting the parent birds (in this case western gulls eat more fish than GW gulls, leading to happier and healthier chicks).