The Great Black-backed Gull (Larus Marinus), Volume 3, Plate 241

Painted in the summer of 1832, during Audubon’s Labrador trip. Audubon left a note to his engraver Havell on the painting: “Finish the ground rather better.”

Audubon was both impressed and appalled by this bird’s fierceness, its reign of terror in the avian world. The plate shows the tyrant gull defeated, its left wing ripped open by a hunter’s shotgun-an image of the destroyer destroyed, cowering in a nest of blood, the open beak emitting a silent scream. One wing still seems to reach up, in a pathetic attempt to connect with the world from which it was so swiftly torn. The anatomical detail included in the plate anticipates the bird’s afterlife-as a natural history specimen.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

[The Black-backed Gull] is extremely voracious, and devours all sorts of food excepting vegetables, even the most putrid carrion, but prefers fresh fish, young birds, or small quadrupeds, whenever they can be procured. It sucks the eggs of every bird it can find, thus destroying great numbers of them, as well as the parents, if weak or helpless. I have frequently seen these Gulls attack a flock of young Ducks while swimming beside their mother, when the latter, if small, would have to take to wing, and the former would all dive, but were often caught on rising to the surface, unless they happened to be among rushes. The Eider Duck is the only one of the tribe that risks her life, on such occasions, to save that of her young. She will frequently rise from the water, as her brood disappear beneath, and keep the Gull at bay, or harass it until her little ones are safe under some shelving rocks, when she flies off in another direction, leaving the enemy to digest his disappointment. But while the poor Duck is sitting on her eggs in any open situation, the marauder assails her, and forces her off, when he sucks the eggs in her very sight. Young Grous are also the prey of this Gull, which chases them over the moss-covered rocks, and devours them before their parents. It follows the shoals of fishes for hours at a time, and usually with great success. On the coast of Labrador, I frequently saw these birds seize flounders on the edges of the shallows; they often attempted to swallow them whole, but, finding this impracticable, removed to some rock, beat them, and tore them to pieces. They appear to digest feathers, bones, and other hard substances with ease, seldom disgorging their food, unless for the purpose of feeding their young or mates, or when wounded and approached by man, or when pursued by some bird of greater power. While at Boston in Massachusetts, one cold winter morning, I saw one of these Gulls take up an eel, about fifteen or eighteen inches in length, from a mud bank. The Gull rose with difficulty, and after some trouble managed to gulp the head of the fish, and flew towards the shore with it, when a White-headed Eagle made its appearance, and soon overtook the Gull, which reluctantly gave up the eel, on which the Eagle glided towards it, and, seizing it with its talons, before it reached the water, carried it off.