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Over two years ago, when I was doing a New York State Big Year, one of the birds that I tried to see but managed to dip was a Common Gull Larus canus that was hanging out in Brooklyn.  Since then I have seen a Common Gull in California where they are referred to as [...]

Daisy, Desi and I had a wonderful Christmas visiting my folks upstate.  One of the nice things about seeing so many relatives is that everyone wanted to help take care of Desi, which meant that Daisy and I had a bit more time to, well, do whatever we wanted.  For me, this included making a [...]

When a birder sees a really, really, good bird and another birder doesn’t see the bird, the first birder will often “grip off” the other birder.  This is a process whereby the birder who failed to see the bird is reminded of having missed the bird in any way imaginable.  For example, let’s say that [...]

A bird often mentioned as a potential vagrant to North America is the Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus, a European species which has undertaken a westerly expansion from its core breeding range (which is still almost entirely in the Ukraine and Europe) since the 1950s. From Hungary, where it was breeding regularly by 1953, it spread [...]

I spent an excellent day yesterday at Portland Bird Observatory and Radipole Lake RSPB Reserve with old friend from way back Richard Crossley, ex-pat Brit, Cape May resident and co-author of the The Shorebird Guide and now well on his way to finishing what could be North America’s best ID guide (more of all of [...]

One tends to think of birding as an idyllic pastime.  One goes into the field, sees gorgeous creatures, identifies them, and then brags to one’s birding friends about what wonderful creatures one saw.  Sometimes one sees one of the gorgeous creatures do something interesting and one tells one’s birding friends about it but with less [...]

One of the more widespread southern hemisphere gulls, the nominate race of the Kelp Gull Larus dominicanus dominicanus occurs along the coasts of South America, New Zealand, Australia and many islands in the Southern Ocean. The subspecies found along the southern African coastline, L. d. vetula, is sometimes split into a full species, Larus vetula, [...]

As often seems to be the case a debate is currently raging on various birding fora concerning the subspecific identification of out-of-range Common Gulls Larus canus ssp. Much of the debate centres around trying to identify the large, dark birds occasionally found in North America where the ‘normal’ form is L. canus brachyrhynchus (the ’short-billed’ [...]

The Laughing Gull Larus (or Leucophaeus if you go by the 49th Supplement to the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds) atricilla, is a common, medium-sized gull of North and South America. It breeds on the Atlantic coast of North America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. Northernmost populations migrate further south in winter, and [...]

Last month I posted some photos of a banded/ringed adult non-breeding Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus taken at Radipole Lake RSPB Reserve in Weymouth, UK. I could only make out a few characters on the band, but it did appear that the gull had been banded in Belgium and that part of the band - containing [...]

Yesterday I posted a photo (reproduced below) taken at the RSPB’s Radipole Lake Reserve (Dorset, UK) and asked whether you could find any Mediterranean Gulls Larus melanocephalus in amongst the Black-headed Gulls. Our great friend Jochen - whom we’ve seen virtually nothing of in the last few months - popped up within seconds and (correctly) [...]

Yesterday I posted some photos of an adult non-breeding Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus I took at Radipole Lake in Dorset (right here in fact). Now that we’re all experts at Med Gull ID (yes, that was irony as I still find them pretty tough sometimes), how about a quick quiz?

I took this photo on the [...]

A bird that (on 10,000 Birds anyway) often gets mentioned as a potential vagrant to North America is the Mediterranean Gull Larus melanocephalus*, a species which has undertaken a westerly expansion from its core breeding range (which is still almost entirely in Europe) since the 1950s. From Hungary, where it was breeding regularly by 1953, [...]

I was flicking through Sibley (not as painful as it may sound, by the way) in a recent idle moment and came upon the description of Lesser Black-backed Gull Larus fuscus which concludes with the paragraph, “Nearly all North American records are of the paler mantled Britain/Iceland population [graellsii]. A few records apparently refer to [...]

Without trying to get up the nose of any serious gull-watcher out there who hasn’t had the opportunity to travel that I have, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have seen virtually every single species of northern hemisphere gull in the last twenty years (and to do that you really need to get yourself out to [...]

…when it’s been renamed in the newly-released 49th Supplement to the A.O.U. Check-list of North American Birds, Seventh Edition.
The new supplement includes various and sundry switches of interest to North American listers, ornithologists, and taxonomists but probably very few others. Paramount among the changes is a new classification and sequence of genera and species adopted [...]

I’m lucky enough to spend a great deal of time flying around the world finding unusual birds, but every so often I get lucky enough to find that something unusual has flown round the world to me. At about 15:30 an email popped up to say that a Franklin’s Gull had been found on [...]

Mike’s photo of Corey and I (I’m the older and not so good looking one of the pair) in his typically evocative Put on a Happy Face post was taken at St. John’s Pond in Long Island, and just off to one side of the image is a Ring-billed Gull. Looking through the photos I’d [...]

Chrissy Guarino is a birder’s birder. In using that term I mean that not only does she have the requisite skills in terms of identifying avians but that she also brings a certain joy to birding that sometimes is in short supply on those long hard slogs that may or may not have a [...]

On Friday the weather forecasters said rain. We (Daisy, some assorted family members, and I) decided to ignore said forecasters and head down to La Jolla, the famous northern coastal suburb of San Diego, for the heck of it. Previous visits there had netted me some pretty good looks at a variety of gulls, Brown Pelicans, shorebirds that like [...]