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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 I was in Choshi fishing port, Japan, at the start of the year I was fortunate to come across a Black-legged Kittiwake that was both very approachable AND uninjured - a great combination for a photographer to take advantage of! There were several kittiwakes in the port - all of course of the eastern [...]

Shorebirds and warblers aren’t, of course, the only groups of birds migrating at the moment - and the excitement that greeted one particular gull species in Alaska this summer reminded me (yet again) that a bird one set of birders walks past without a second glance will cause another set near-coronaries as they sprint across [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]