Black-headed Gulls following the Plough

After leaving the Royal College of Art, Tunnicliffe returned to Macclesfield where he did commercial graphic work for agricultural firms. It was Riginald Wagstaffe, the curator of the Stockport museum, who encouraged his interst in ornithology, leading to his lifelong study of birds and his magnificent series of measured drawings which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1974 and sold to the Anglesey musuem after his death. Tunnicliffe had moved to Anglesey in 1947 to a small house called Shorelands overlooking the Cefni esturary where he found himself in an ideal environment for his work filling fifty sketchbooks with studies of birds.
A similar composition to the current watercolour with gulls descending on a field that is being ploughed, is illustrated in, I. Naill, Tunnicliffe's Countryside, Clive Holloway Books, London, 1983, p.165.