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Mew Gull : Mew Gull Arliaq Have you ever thought you heard a kitten mewing and the sound came from above you? And when you glanced up it wasn't a kitten at all, but a small white and gray gull flying around in lazy circles. Then you looked it up in your bird guide, and you found it was called a Mew gull. Well, the Mew gull is one of the few birds whose English name imitates its call (remember "onomatopoeia"?). There are a handful of others, like the chickadee, killdeer and whimbrel, but you'll be hard pressed to find many more. This isn't true of Yupik bird names, though. Probably half of those I've written about so far are imitative of their calls. But the Y-K Delta Yupik name for the Mew gull, "Arliaq," is another story. According to the Yupik Eskimo Dictionary, its origin is from the Aleut, "agligax," their name for the same bird. It's a mystery to me how that happened, and if anyone has an idea, let me know. Bristol Bay Yupik people have another name for the bird, Egiaq. And then there is the generic name for gull, Naruyaq, which many Yupiks use to describe the Mew gull, probably because it's such a friendly gull, willing to share your food right from your hand (which is the meaning of "naruyaq"). And we cant forget the scientific name, Larus canus, from the Latin meaning "hoary-white seabird." Not a very imaginative name, but such are scientific names. I simply call this friendly little gull "mewy." Mewies have some fascinating behavior, by the way, among which is their courtship display. The female assumes a hunched posture and slowly approaches the male, flagging her head as she moves forward. When she is directly in front of her mate she begs for food by pecking on his bill. He then regurgitates food for her. Mating follows. This display is repeated during the period of egg laying. Speaking of eggs, Arliaq lays three buff-brown or olive-brown eggs in a grass-lined scrape on a river bar, or in a shallow cup on a platform of twigs, seaweed, grass and moss in the top of a low-growing spruce next to a lake. But you might find a mewy's nest anywhere, as long as there is water nearby. And there may or may not be a colony of them nesting fairly close together. The incubation period for the eggs is about 25 days. During this period the male is especially protective of his brooding mate. You do not want to even get close to the nest. If you do, heaven help the crown of your head. And after the eggs hatch, it's double trouble for any human approaching the nest or chicks. Both adults will be on you lickety split, and if you werent bald before they attacked, you certainly will be after they finish with you. As with other species of gulls, the chicks are semiprecocial. That is, they are born with their eyes open, are covered with downy feathers and are able to walk. But unlike fully precocial chicks, they remain in or near the nest for the first two or three weeks after hatching. Adults feed their hatchlings by regurgitating food, especially fish, then holding it in the tip of their bill for the chick to peck at. They may also regurgitate the food completely in the nest or on the ground in front of the young birds. Feeding of the chicks is done through the fledging period, which usually takes place about a month after hatching. Slowly but surely the quickly growing fledglings then learn to feed themselves, and they become omnivores like their parents, eating everything from insects and earthworms to fish, mollusks, crustaceans, young birds, mice, and grains. They also learn some interesting feeding strategies from their parents, like dropping sea urchins from the air onto rocks or other hard surfaces to crack them open. They become useful scavengers around harbors and beaches, cleaning up dead fish, crabs, and other sea animals cast up after a tide or storm. I've seen them doing this clean-up work on the Hooper Bay beach after tides and storms there. Another interesting feeding behavior mewies learn over time is to drink salt water. Like all gulls, they can do this by eliminating excess salt through a pair of glands located on top of the skull above the eyes. When juvenile gulls fledge they do not resemble their parents. They instead have a distinctive streaked brown plumage which continues to change until the third year when their feather color becomes like that of their parents and is finally worthy of the scientific name, canus, which means "hoary-white." They are then fully mature birds who can have families of their own and peck the pates of humans bold enough to approach their nests. Be careful! » List of Yupik Birds

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