…or, maybe just your syrinx?
Beachgoer and gull noticer George Ingalls sent in a video and a question about a curious encounter he had with a gull in Maine. The herring gull had approached him and some friends, obviously hoping for some food. George reported that the bird was making a very cat-like meowing sound. This did not surprise me, since gulls make a call called a “mew” and another called a “yeow” and it all can be a bit cat-like. The mew call is given with the head lowered and the neck arched. It’s communicative purpose can vary a lot–sometimes it’s to call the kids back if they’ve wandered to far, sometimes it’s to call a mate in to help with nest defense–basically, the mew varies with context. I figured the gull George saw and heard was doing a mew, but when I watched the video, what I heard was waaaay more feline than the standard gull sound.
George had speculated that maybe the bird had damaged vocal cords or something like that. Birds don’t have vocal chords like we do, and their soundmaking equivalent of our “voice box,” the syrinx, is not high up in the throat like ours, but down in their chests, at the point where the trachea ends and splits into two bronchial tubes. Nonetheless, gulls do definitely suffer oral and throat trauma routinely, getting fishing hooks and such embedded in those tissues. It’s possible that this bird did have some sort of similar trauma that altered its voice.
We do encounter some variability in vocal performances among the gulls of Appledore. In our database there are notes like, “husky voice–very sexy” for some individuals. As with George’s gull, we never really know what accounts for these individual differences, but they are always cool to hear, and we’re grateful to George for capturing this one on video so we can all hear this bird produce less a mew than a meow.
The Gulls Of Appledore 