Yesterday I wrote about the water lilies beside that quiet Dutch pond — those perfect white blooms that looked exactly like the ones back home. Identical. As if nature had decided that when it comes to beauty, the design was already perfect and there was no reason to mess with it.
But truth be told… the lilies weren’t the first thing that caught my attention.
That honor goes to a small white gull standing calmly on a weathered wooden post at the edge of the pond. While the rest of the countryside was going about its peaceful routine — sheep grazing, ducks drifting, wind brushing through the grass — this little fellow stood there like he had been hired as the official Pond Supervisor.
Perfect posture.
Serious expression.
Bright red legs like he had just stepped out of a tiny pair of Italian loafers.
Naturally I did what any photographer would do. I started walking slowly around him to get different angles.
And here’s where things got interesting.
Every time I moved… he pivoted.
Not flying away.
Not panicking.
Just pivoting on that post like a tiny white radar dish, calmly turning to keep me directly in front of him. Of all the people wandering around that pond, I was apparently the one he decided required close supervision.
Now to be fair… I did have a rather large lens pointed in his direction.
Eventually I got the photographs and then began the next phase of the adventure: figuring out what on earth this bird was.
Birds that have breeding plumage and non-breeding plumage were clearly designed to drive novice birders like me absolutely crazy.
Well… more crazy.
I started with what seemed like a reasonable baseline.
The name that kept coming up was Black-headed Gull.
Which seemed promising until I looked back at my photo.
I mean… look at this bird.
White head.
White body.
No black head anywhere in sight.
Would you have guessed that was its name?
Apparently in the spring this very respectable white-headed gentleman puts on a rich chocolate-brown hood and suddenly the name makes sense. But in the off-season he’s walking around incognito with only a small smudge behind the eye — like someone started coloring his head and then got distracted halfway through.
Birding, it turns out, is full of little surprises like that.
And thanks to this very patient Dutch gull, I was introduced to one of them… moments before the water lilies stole the rest of the show.
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