Oh, come on! First you are telling me that there are whistling ducks, and now you’d like me to believe in laughing gulls. I wasn’t born yesterday.

Well, have a look and listen to this. Maybe the joke is on you because these birds are clearly laughing out loud about something. Or, maybe the key word here is loud. They need to be heard above the sometimes raucous and noisy environments that they frequent. Think crashing surf, voluable birds, crowds of beach goers. Maybe they use their loud “laughter” to defend territory for nesting or foraging, to create social cohesion within their large “laughing” communities, and to warn of predators and other hazards.

By the way, laughing gulls are not seagulls. That is because there is no such thing as a seagull. There are many gull species, at least 28 in North America and many more worldwide. There are herring gulls, California gulls, ring-billed gulls, Iceland gulls, glaucous gulls, lesser black-backed gulls, great black-backed gulls, and more, including laughing gulls. But there are no seagulls.

Laughing gulls aquire their striking black hood during nesting season and shed it in the winter. They often nest in huge colonies with as many as 14,000 pairs (just imagine the laughter). Laughing gulls are found along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America as well as in the Carribean and South America. Pairs of laughing gulls nest cooperatively with both male and female building the nest and incubating the eggs. They are opportunistic omnivores (willing to eat anything) and kleptoparasites (snatching food from unsuspecting animals such as literally out of the mouths of pelicans and the hands of humans). Usually, groups of laughing gulls (or any kind of gull) are referred to as flocks or colonies, but they are also called squabbles, which seems more metaphorically apt.

Laughing gulls may not actually be laughing, but their calls sound like laughter. Who doesn’t find laughter contagious and conducive to a brighter outlook on a rainy day or during dark times? Made me think of this 1974 classic by Neil Sedaka.

I have a very loud whistle using two fingers against the underside of my tongue. I learned this by practicing while delivering morning newspapers (Peoria Journal Star) from my bicycle at age 12. Mind you, it was between 4 and 5 AM. So when I mastered the whistle, I am now not certain how happy my customers were to have their arriving newspaper heralded in this manner. Nevertheless, it has been a useful skill on many occasions since. But if it whistles like a duck…

It must be a whistling duck, a black-bellied whistling duck in this case. I don’t think young whistling ducklings need to practice to acquire this ability. However, knowing the contorsions of my tongue, lips, and fingers required for me to learn to whistle, it’s hard to picture mastery of this skill with a large flat duck bill instead of lips. Quacking seems easier. But have a listen (and a look). By the way, if it quacks it is probably a duck, and most likely a female duck since male ducks don’t quack.

Black-bellied whistling ducks are found in central South America as well as Central America and coastal Mexico. In the US they are most likely to reside on the gulf coast of Florida. However, their range has been steadily moving northward with a lone whistler turning up in Wisconsin recently. They have also been known as tree ducks because of their ability to roost and nest in trees (not unlike wood ducks). Whistling ducks actually look more like geese with their long necks and legs and resemble them in their sexual dimorphism (males and females look alike) and their long-term pair relationships.

Pink beaks and pink legs give these (male and female) ducks a playful, if not somewhat gaudy, appearance as if wearing hot pink tights and coral lipstick. Pretty suitable since they prefer to forage at night and maybe take in the local club scene before roosting all day. They tend to hang in large and noisy flocks (all that whistling).

I couldn’t find a poem about whistling ducks, but here’s a sweet prose poem about another long-term pairing by Mary Oliver that will do.

"The Whistler," by Mary Oliver

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds warbled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

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Laughing gulls - how gull-ible do you think I am?

If it whistles like a duck...