Just Don't Call Them Seagulls -- You Can Call Them Inspiring Or Call Them Disgusting, But . . .Just Don't Call Them Seagulls

RICHARD BACH'S ROMANCE with flight began in boyhood when he watched the gulls glide the updraft along the breakwater of California's Corona del Mar. They swooped, rolled and soared, suspended on air "without strings or wire."

"You could hear the sound of their passing," recalls the author, who now lives in Stanwood. "You could hear the wind on their wings. Here, it seemed, was the perfect creature: the one with all the attributes my soul yearned to own."

Bach did take to the air, as a pilot. After flying Air Force fighters he got an idea for a spiritual allegory based on gulls, "a story that struck me as something already finished." He hurriedly wrote two thirds of it down, stalled, and then eight years later woke from a vivid dream and completed the manuscript.

The rest is publishing legend. Every publisher in New York turned down the "talking seagull book." Then an editor at Macmillan who liked Bach's two earlier books on human flight asked him if he had anything else lying around, unaware her bosses had already passed on a bird named Jonathan. He sent it again, she secured a modest first printing of 5,000 copies, and in 1970 lightning struck.

The little gull that could was a perfect hero for a troubled time. "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages. In its wake Bach made and lost a fortune, dissolved one marriage and found another, made up with an estranged son, and wrote a series of books as cherished by some readers for their insights as they are scorned by others for their sentiment. His latest, "Out Of My Mind" (Morrow, $18.95) was published in August.

Bach is no ornithologist and only the most casual of bird watchers, and cheerfully admits he did little research for his phenomenal book. Yet to millions of people he captured the spirit of one of the most lovely, amusing, cheeky, obnoxious and commonly observed of all wild animals. There's something about gulls, and Bach managed to turn a garbage-dump bird into a link to God.

Dennis Paulson, director of the Slate Museum of Natural History at the University of Puget Sound and a gull expert, remembers reading "Jonathan" with pleasure. The birds have fascinated him as they did Bach.

The ornithologist has just one niggling criticism, for which no layman can really be blamed.

Scientifically, Paulson points out, there is no such thing as a seagull.

GULLS, YES - half a dozen species frequent our Northwest and as many more casually visit - but biologists don't attach the appellation "sea" to any of them. Ring-billed gulls nest at Potholes Reservoir near Moses Lake. Bonaparte's gulls breed in Alaskan and Canadian lakes. Heermann's gulls migrate from the Gulf of California to British Columbia. Gulls fly the Columbia River, make nests in old-growth forest, and shuttle across Snoqualmie Pass. A lot of "seagulls" never see an ocean.

The Mormons have built a Salt Lake City monument to California gulls because they devoured a plague of locusts in 1848. "I heard the voice of fowl flying overhead and saw a flock of seven gulls," one pioneer reported. "They came faster and more of them until the heavens were darkened." It seemed a visitation miracle, and perhaps so.

But California gulls nest by the tens of thousands by the Great Salt Lake and the growing cloud of gulls exhibited classic feeding behavior: gulls routinely follow their fellows who seem to be finding food. One reason the bird is white is that it can be spotted by colleagues from great distances when clustering to feed, drawing more and more in like gravity. Gulls are a "me-too" bird.

Still, the saving of the early Utah settlement is representative of what has become a close human-bird relationship: We feed them and they clean up after us. Gull numbers here have exploded 10 times or more since European settlement, Paulson estimated. They are litter pickers, scavengers and thieves, thriving on our discards, cannery offal and the worms turned up by tractors or wiggling to the surface of golf courses and playing fields after a heavy rain.

"I call them klepto-parasites," he said. "These birds evolved on wild, remote coasts. To see one on a Dumpster in the morning is a reminder how much our world has changed."

They are also feisty, bullying and greedy, gobbling the eggs and chicks of puffins and terns and even stealing fish from a pelican's pouch.

Gulls must be forgiven their bad manners, of course, because they are so beautiful when they seem to play in high winds, using their pointed wings like a kite. Biologists have no idea if an animal with a brain the size of a gull's has any sense of play, but certainly they convey a kind of joy. Their cry is haunting and the sun shining through their wings can give them a Jonathan-like ethereal glow.

Gulls are also plain for a bird, mostly white and gray. The reason is practical: Their white bellies make gulls less visible to fish when flying or floating on water. Scandinavian scientists painted gull bellies dark and noted that their feeding efficiency sharply declined.

Gulls also feed best in flocks when prey escaping one bird might dart into the path of another. Accordingly, their congregations help the individual as well as the group. So instinctual is this bunching that biologists have watched the birds converge on a thrown white handkerchief.

Identification can be difficult because the differences between gull species are subtle to our eyes. Worse, young gulls tend to have brown plumage that takes three to four years to mature to the white of a sexually mature adult.

Sievert Rohwer, bird curator at the Burke Museum, suspects the brown plumage - a handicap when feeding at sea - is useful camouflage on the beach. Younger birds scavenge shores for food that older, more experienced gulls miss, and the dull coloring gives them time to eat it before a bullying elder notices and zooms in to take it away.

That peculiar red spot on a gull's bright yellow beak is where their young peck to encourage Mom and Dad to regurgitate food into their hungry beaks. Chicks will instinctively peck at a yellow stick with a red spot that looks nothing like a gull.

The eastern North Pacific where we live has one of the richest concentrations of seabirds in the world. Alaska alone is estimated to have 40 million seabirds, and Washington's Protection Island is home to 44,000. Gulls are in the bird order that includes sandpipers, skuas, murres, auklets and puffins.

Two varieties of gulls breed here: Glaucous winged (meaning gray-winged) and Western. Many of the gulls seen in the Northwest - the Mew, the California, Bonaparte's, the Ring-billed, Heermann's - are passing through on their way to breeding grounds. In all, 13 species of gull have been spotted in the Pacific Northwest - nearly a third of the world's total - and October is a time when local gull populations are at or near their migratory peak.

MAYBE WE LIKE gulls because they're average. If Bach's Jonathan represented the everyman trying to achieve a higher plane, gulls in real life are a kind of everybird. Albatrosses and petrels have vast wing spans and are superbly designed to soar, but can't turn tightly. Penguins are flightless and clumsy while excellent swimmers.

Gulls are an adaptive compromise: shorter and wider than a petrel but able flyers, middling swimmers with smaller webbed feet that also make them adequate walkers, and modest divers. They are merely OK at twisting to catch popcorn thrown into the air, and while cormorants can dive to 100 feet, gulls seldom do more than poke their heads underwater. Weighing two to three pounds, gulls are moderates in physique. It works.

They also are comfortable with humans, being too oily to enjoy as food and officially protected from hunting because of their usefulness as sanitation engineers. They live long enough - one gull on a Rhode Island lightship lived 44 years - to learn our ways. Gulls are bold around us, and it is no accident that Alfred Hitchcock used gulls and crows, two species adapted to our presence, as the primary marauders in his classic horror film, "The Birds."

In the nearly four decades since that film, canneries have closed, ships have curbed their dumping of garbage and dumps have been replaced with sanitary landfills. Scientists haven't done census studies to determine if gull populations are declining as a result, but if they are, it is at the relief of other seabird species.

Rohwer noted that gull success is a prime example of one of the most overlooked problems in conservation: species over-abundance. Animals that adapt well to humans can push endangered ones even closer to the edge, and Atlantic puffins were driven to near-extinction by exploding gull numbers.

The old English word for gull is mew, indicative of its cry. "Gull" itself may come from the Breton "gwel-a," meaning to weep, and certainly the keening call of gulls is one of the most familiar sounds in all nature, as distinctive as a lion's roar. Their Japanese name translates as "sea cats" for the mewing sound they make.

The most frequently sighted gulls in the Seattle area are probably the Glaucous-winged and, in winter, the smaller but similar looking Mew. The Glaucous-winged will nest on buildings, ferry piers, old pilings and derelict boats and is resident enough to deserve the term native.

GULLS WILL EAT almost anything, from apples to sea stars, swallowing an arm or two of the latter and starting to digest it in its throat while the rest is still hanging out of its beak. They've been observed eating sea urchins, carrion, young rabbits and beetles. They sometimes crack open shellfish by dropping them from the air onto rocks, and Paulson has observed them learning: Young gulls are initially puzzled when the same tactic doesn't work when they drop clams onto mud.

Although their bodies must be kept a piping 100 degrees, gulls are supremely comfortable in the most miserable of Northwest weather. Their feathers keep them dry and warm - they preen them with oil from a gland near the tail - and only their beaks and feet get cold. A gull balancing on one leg is probably warming the other.

They can drink sea water because a gland at the top of their head extracts the salt. If you see liquid dripping from the end of a gull's beak it is likely the resulting saline solution being secreted.

Like many birds, gulls are fairly monogamous, mating for life and rejoining each other at breeding time with yodeling cries of recognition. Males woo females in part by regurgitating food into the beaks of their companions.

Most gulls nest in colonies, staking out a nest site in what can be an initial squabble over territory. After mating, females typically lay three eggs which males spend slightly more time incubating than females. Both parents share in the task of feeding the young and chicks that wander from their own nest run the risk of being cannibalized. Gulls are fully feathered within seven weeks of hatching.

As with many wild animals, early mortality is high. A British Columbia study showed up to a third of the eggs failed to hatch, and up to a quarter of the chicks that did emerge didn't survive to fledgling stage. Death also is common the first couple of years, when gulls are less experienced finding food. Yet if a gull survives this gantlet, it may be crafty and hardy enough to live for decades.

And if "seagull" is technically incorrect, gulls certainly concentrate in tidal areas. We might credit the presence of our own gulls to the pull of the moon. When Rohwer led a recent collecting expedition to the South Pacific, his students found plenty of terns but no gulls, presumably because of the lack of tidal change at the equator.

SO. A BIRD of moderate speed and endurance, a hanger-on, a garbage gourmand, a squawker. Why was Jonathan this bird? Why does almost everyone stop once in a while and watch the gull with pleasure?

Somehow gulls fit our landscape and our mindscape. One can no more imagine our Northwest without gulls than without Mount Rainier, Douglas fir and the smell of salt wind. Bach, who says, "The only gift many of us have to give is our own foolishness," confesses a continuing fascination with this bird, four decades after Jonathan first popped into his head. "They're still magic to me."

We are triggered to respond to animals as we respond to beauty, danger or remembered scents. Snakes provoke fascinated fear, a hooked salmon a thrill, slugs a curious repulsion and horses a sense of partnership. Children understand this better than grownups do.

Gulls evoke peace. Maybe it's their relationship with water, so soothing in itself. Maybe it's their reliable presence, reassuring us that no matter how explosive the growth of our cities, some connection to the natural world remains. Maybe it's their color, a spot of brightness on the darkest days.

And maybe it's the sheer exultation of their flight, a grace and ambition that seems to go beyond the mere need to gather food and absorbs the energy of the planet itself. Bach understood this. Jonathan the seagull was a bird of possibility - and it is endless possibility that draws people to and keeps them in the Northwest.

William Dietrich, author and former Seattle Times reporter, writes Our Northwest for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is staff photographer for the magazine. ------------------------------- Residents and Visitors

Six commonly observed gull species among the 13 that live in or travel through the Northwest. Two - the Glaucous-winged and Western - breed here.

Heerman's Gull Medium size. White head, predominantly gray body, red bill. Normally breeds off Baja California, travels as far north as Canada July to October.

Ring-billed Gull Medium size. Greenish-yellow legs, with a distinctive black band around its beak. Ranges inland through prairie and Great Basin in the U.S. and Canada.

Glaucous-winged Gull White body, large yellow bill with red spot. Ranges from Alaska to Oregon. Noted for scavenging around human settlements.

Bonaparte's Gull Smaller, black-headed and black-billed. Migrates through Northwest in fall and spring.

Mew Gull Medium-small size. Black wing tips, greenish-yellow legs and bill. Found widely along both salt water and inland lakes and rivers. Winters along the Pacific Coast.

Western Gull Large. Snowy white body, slate-gray back and sides, yellow bill. Generally ranges along the west coast of the U.S. and Mexico.