The Fifth Pass
Four times. Four times, covering two minutes, a parent circled a tightly packed colony of 300 birds, calling out to its offspring. It never received the expected response. The cacophony of squawks, caws and shrieks made it difficult to identify any unique vocalizations.
On the fifth pass, the bird emerged from the salt spray, its body tilted as it leaned into a hard-banked turn. The fish that once dangled from its bill, plump and fresh, now flailed in the wind as the bird sped toward its intended target.
Ten feet away, a small tern with a white head that faded to a shaggy black mullet squawked in anticipation of a meal. With its chest out and neck thrown back, the small bird readied itself to launch forward should any of the nearby juveniles attempt to steal the incoming fish.
They met in the middle of the colony. The parent engineered a landing onto an empty patch of sand. The eager juvenile rushed forward to grab its meal, a northern anchovy with its face and tail reddened by pooling blood.
As the juvenile sought to position the fish in its bill, the parent’s wings suddenly shot upward. Seeking leverage, the adult leaned its head back, trying to yank the fish from the younger bird. In response, the juvenile stiffened its grip and pulled down on the fish head. Blood trickled from the gills of the disputed and now stretched fish. A sign that seemed to bring a momentary truce to the standoff.
The parent, unwilling to yield to an impostor, broke the stalemate with a strong wingbeat. Sand swirled from the beach as the parent gained lift. The juvenile stretched its neck upward, struggling to maintain its grip on the fish. Blood from the fish’s head ran into the juvenile’s bill, a taste of what was supposed to be.
As the parent, with its eyes narrowed and hardened, wrestled control of the meal from the juvenile, the bloodied slime of the fish stretched to maintain their connection. Parent and juvenile stared at each other from either side of the slime string until another definitive wingbeat from the adult broke their connection. The juvenile, wide-eyed and defeated, squawked its objection to an unsympathetic adult. Having rooted out the con artist, the parent’s search for the right juvenile would continue.
