Black-headed gull, or common gull, or river gull (lat. Chroicocephalus ridibundus) is a species of a small bird from the genus Chroicocephalus of the gull family (Laridae). Order: Charadriiformes. Class: Birds. Type: Chordates. Kingdom: Animals.
I met her on the Khorol River in the Poltava region. There is a lot of silence and it is comfortable for birds live next to a person. There are a lot of nature and dense thickets.
Description. A well-known gull, the smallest of the common species. Smaller and slenderer than the gray gull, it flies with faster wing beats. Body length 38–44 cm, weight 200–300 g, wingspan 94–105 cm. Breeds in large colonies in swamps. In the summer, adult birds have a brown head with an incomplete white ring around the eye (white “eyelids”), a red beak and legs, light gray wings above, with white outer flight feathers and a black pattern at the end.
Noisy bird, especially in colonies. The usual cry is a creaky “kyarrr” or something similar, often repeated several times.
Nesting places. It nests on overgrown lakes, ponds with floodplains, and large swamps. Breeds in colonies ranged from a few pairs to several thousand pairs.
Nest location. Nests are located on floodplains and islands, in places difficult for humans and four-legged predators. In most cases, the nests are placed one next to the other on dry hummocks, but they can also be located on even, damp soil. You can also see such nests that are built on broken large stems of dry reeds, rising 20-30 cm above the water level. On them, as on piles, a platform is made of dry stems of aquatic plants, on which the nest itself is located.
Nest building material. The nest is built from dry reeds, dry pieces of cattail, sedge, horsetail, reeds and other aquatic plants.
The shape and size of the nest. The gull’s nest is a very simple structure – a rounded flooring of dry pieces of cattail, sedge, horsetail, reeds and other aquatic plants, in which a small depression is made from eggs. The thickness of the flooring on dry bumps is small (20-40 mm), but the damper the place, the denser and thicker the base of the nest (often reaches 150-200 mm). When building a nest, the bird first lays large and coarse stems, then thin and small ones. Inside the nest, the seagull does not like something, and the eggs lie in the rough building material. Nest diameter 160-500mm, tray diameter 140-200mm, tray depth 20-50mm, bottom thickness 20-140mm.
Artist Elena Bandurka 