Photographed near Pangnirtung, a community on the shore of Pangnirtung Fjord in Nunavut, 31.5 miles south of the Arctic Circle and reachable only by air or sea.

Pangnirtung is the gateway to Auyuittuq National Park, whose entrance lies at the head of the fjord, and it is also home to the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts and Crafts. We went ashore for guided town tours led by people who live there. For a bird like this one the town is simply a reliable food source: a settlement on a productive fjord, with a fishery, means scraps, and gulls have been exploiting exactly that relationship with Arctic communities for as long as the communities have existed.

That relationship is genuinely old. Inuit and their ancestors have occupied this coastline for thousands of years, and the birds, the seals, the whales and the people have been part of one system for all of it, which is a different proposition from the European history of the region, which is about four hundred years old and largely extractive.

Fun fact: Glaucous Gulls are so consistently pale that in poor light at distance, experienced Arctic observers sometimes pick them out not by colour or size but by that flat, even brightness, the bird with nothing dark anywhere on it.

On printing this one: there is more environment in this frame than in the other gull images. The fjord and the mountains behind Pangnirtung place the bird somewhere specific. That makes it the one to choose if you want a single gull print that also reads as a landscape. Pearl paper, and include a mat and frame with your order to avoid costly custom framing down the line.