Gulls, Terns & Skimmers

About the Family

The Laridae are the most familiar charadriiform birds of every shore. Active, obvious, and seldom shy, they are sometimes in our lives even more than we would like. They can be divided by what they eat: Gulls generally eat any animal they can swallow, dead or alive, and they gather their food with an astonishing opportunism and ingenuity; terns mostly eat fish that they dive for, and they stay out of each other’s way in loose foraging aggregations; and skimmers use their highly specialized bills to snag their prey from the surface of calm water, often in gracefully coordinated bands. Larids lay their eggs on sandy beaches, atop precarious cliff ledges, and even in trees, and the precocial young are fed at home until they fledge.