Lift

Today was a pretty stressful day, for a succession of reasons with which I won't bore you. Suffice it to say, I'm glad it's nearly over.

R and I went to Stratford at lunch time, for no better reason that we felt the need of decent cake, and I spent a while trying to capture the Black-headed Gulls taking off from and landing on the Bancroft Basin. I think it's pretty obvious that this one is going up rather than coming down - not least because most incoming birds land by simply gliding until they stall, and the bulk of them end up face-down in the water. 

I don't think I've caught this exact moment before, and I like the fact that the gull is clearly exerting a lot of power to move its wings like this, while its overall demeanour seems quite casual. The stretch of those wings is pretty impressive too; I don't have any figures for standing height versus wing length, but the average Black-headed Gull is around 36cm long, and its wingspan is about 105cm. By contrast the Jackdaw, with a very similar body size, has a wingspan of only 70cm.