Hellooooo... is any one home?

Sat for a while at the estuary today just observing. I noticed a group of shags on the end of the shingle bank and there seemed to be a bit of a fuss going on. When I focused the camera on them with the trusty zoom, I could see it was a mixture of adult shags and their young. The young were almost as big as the adults but stood out with their blotched fronts in contrast to the adults pristine white.

When a young shag wanted feeding it flapped it's wings madly and pestered around its parent, and it was this action that had caught my eye.

The act of feeding was something I had never seen before in these birds. The chick inserted his whole head inside the adults mouth until his head had completely vanished from sight. The parent bird meanwhile struggled to maintain balance under the assault.

Here is a feeding chick and its parent, along with a disinterested seagull that wouldn't get out of the way.