Fancy a fossick at the tip?
Photographer Richard Robinson visited Wellington’s Southern Landfill to document the population of black-backed gulls for New Zealand Geographic. It was a tricky assignment. How do you show the number of birds dining out on the rubbish in one image?
We count 247 black-backed gulls in this photograph, plus the odd pigeon—and one human up to his hips in rubbish.
To count them we used a high-resolution file and—after AI tools completely failed—we turned to a very manual count using markers for each bird. It didn’t feel like a terrific use of time, but it did give us a fairly accurate result. Only “fairly” because there were gulls behind gulls, gulls up to their necks in rubbish, pigeons that looked like gulls, and gulls that would be trimmed off the three-millimetre bleed of the page when it was printed.
But maybe we missed one or two. Have a scroll around the image below and make your own count. Look out for pigeons, and a contractor!
