Turning the ordinary into something extraordinary is always a goal when heading out to make photographs. The world is full of visual chaos, and it is our job to try and bring back a photograph that catches your eye no matter what the subject matter, even a gull.

In the world of bird photography on Cape Cod, there is likely nothing more ordinary than the lowly gull. I avoid using the term “seagull,” because as my old photo pal Barry Donahue would say, there is no such thing, and he was quick to catch the term in my photo captions and let me know that.

The Cape’s most popular gull would be the herring gull, Larus argentatus, translated into English, Larus is the genus and argentatus meaning, “decorated with silver.” They stack up like Black Friday shoppers outside a mall entrance when the herring runs are full of fish. But most shutterbugs run across them working the tide line catching green crabs and plucking quahogs.

When our summer photo interns arrived each summer and headed out on their inaugural first assignments to find feature photographs, gull photos roosting on harbor pilings, often silhouetted against a sunset were a popular subject. As a bonus, the caption was an easy write.

So on slow news days, when the call goes forth from the news desk for photographs to fill some news holes, there are days when the only subject matter that presents itself are the ever-present gulls. My latest encounter was with a camera-friendly immature herring gull.

It was close to sunset. The weary youngster had spent a good bit of time collecting clams, dropping them at altitude on the rocks, protecting its meal from marauding relatives nearby and then repeating the process. The setting sun provided a nice catch light in its eyes. It didn’t fly off when I started our photo session. It was in the one-legged perch position, many theories on that, I prefer to think they are just resting the other leg. As the session when through several different head postures, it did a quick hop, now balancing with only half its foot on the railing. Showing off?

I doubt it, but as we say in photo land, “it made a good photo.”

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Stunt gull puts on a balancing act after a long day of clamming