A Different Kind of Scavenger

There's an old saying that says "Nature abhors a vacuum".

The truth of this saying was brought home to me on a recent Alaska trip with the World Bird Sanctuary.

Here in the "lower forty-eight" we are accustomed to seeing vultures soaring the skies looking for roadkill and other dead animals of various kinds.  They are nature's clean-up crew.

As we cruised the waters of the inside passage, and later, as my husband and I hiked the beaches and trails of Kodiak Island on an Alaska back country extension of our own, I realized that I had not seen one single vulture soaring.  There were plenty of eagles, and gulls of all kinds--but none of what we here recognize as the "clean-up crew".  I asked our guide, Mike, about this apparent absence of scavengers.  He said that, "Up here the eagles and gulls fill that niche."

Then it dawned on me!  I had seen lots of eagles.  They were everywhere--even soaring low in the middle of town!  Apparently these "city eagles" have learned that where there are fishing boats, there is fish carrion!  However, most of the eagles we saw seemed to be doing what we like to think of as "natural" behavior--fishing!

By far the most plentiful birds were the gulls.  We had seen hundreds.  They were everywhere, and I remembered that when we watched a pod of humpback whales bubblenet feeding, it was the gulls circling overhead that alerted us to where the whales would surface in their feeding frenzy.  Then the gulls would swoop in to clean up the scraps left from the carnage.


Likewise, when we walked into a remote area to do some bear viewing, and there didn't happen to be a bear in sight at the time--it was the circling gulls that alerted us to the location of a sow and her cub.

And when we were on the tidal flat watching the bears catching the salmon that were traveling upstream to spawn, the gulls appeared from nowhere the minute one of the bears caught a fish.


They would circle frantically while the bear devoured most of the fish, and then swoop in to clean up the scraps.

Even though we were on an isolated island with no roads, no electricity to operate a garbage disposal, and no trash pickup service, there was no garbage of the edible kind, or carrion, laying around.


So, let's hear it for old cliches..."Nature abhors a vacuum", "You can't fool mother nature", etc., etc.


Submitted by Gay Schroer, Volunteer/Photographer for the World Bird Sanctuary