You are browsing the archives of gulls.

“Gulls of the Americas”,
Steve Howell and Jon Dunn (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
Identifying gulls - particularly 1st and 2nd year birds - is one of birding’s most difficult skills to master, as anyone who’s ever stepped onto a beach in eg California, Kuwait, or Korea will know all too well. The variation in plumage seems endless. The [...]

Gulls… we birders can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. The gregarious, opportunistic, adaptable avians of the family Laridae are never hard to find, no matter how far you are from an ocean, but can prove nigh impossible to identify definitively. The trouble with gulls, at least from a birding perspective (picnickers [...]

So I woke up this morning and checked my email. An Ivory Gull in Piermont! What a wonderful opportunity to see this gorgeous species for the first time. Too bad I had to work, and, worse yet, my work would take me to Poughkeepsie, NY, more than halfway to Piermont…so close and [...]

Vega Gulls Larus vegae
Choshi Port, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. 30 January 2006
 
The Vega Gull Larus vegae is the common “Herring Gull” of North-east Asia, breeding on islands and cliffs in the High Arctic and wintering widely throughout eg South Korea and Japan.

Structurally Vega is typically ill-proportioned - often looking rather short-legged, front heavy and rather large-headed [...]

Non-adult Ring-billed Gulls Larus delawarensis
North America, various dates
 
THE gull most likely to be seen in urban settings across North America, the Ring-billed Gull is a widespread species that many people will be very familiar with. Increasingly identified in the UK (where it was first identified at Blackpill, Swansea Bay, in 1973) it is thought that [...]

Choshi Port, Chiba Prefecture, Japan.
30 January 2006
 

 
Birding options in mid-winter in the Tokyo/Narita region are fairly limited if you’re on a short trip - like northern Europe and the northern parts of North America there are relatively few passerines around (most are struggling to find shelter in what’s left of the equatorial rainforests [...]

Prospect Park/Wheat Ridge City Greenbelt, Denver, 25 October 2005

This was my first visit to Denver, the “Mile High” City (which lies at a lung-tugging average of about 5200′/1585m above sea-level), but to be honest all I wanted to do was stay indoors and recover from the exertions of the trip I’d just done to Bangkok [...]