Another bird that I ran into in Cedar Key last week was this very outgoing adult ring billed gull (Larus delawarensis). Although the brown pelicans were in the process of molting into their breeding plumage, this guy was still sporting his winter attire. Ring billed gulls are winter visitors here in Florida and head north into Canada and the very northernmost parts of the United States to breed. This bird had been out on the water floating around, and when I wandered out onto the beach he flew over to see what I was up to. I imagine he hoped that I had food. He wasn’t at all shy about approaching me quite closely, which gave me the chance to get some good facial shots. In the profile shot above, he was walking up the beach from the water. In the shot below, he had been looking directly at me, but just as I snapped the shutter, he looked away at a child who began running and shouting on the beach. I thought surely that the noise and running child would scare him off, but actually he just glanced in her direction, and then turned his attention right back towards me. He did decide to fly off a couple minutes later once he decided that my camera wasn’t food, or if it was, that I wasn’t going to share. He definitely was not exactly a scaredy-cat, I mean bird.