Hello everyone and welcome to July or as I call it now “Ja’ Y’d You F Up Your Summer”. Just a quick update, I made it through surgery and everywhere I walk the 6 Million Dollar Man theme can now be heard. Big thanks to my wife for having to pick up the slack (although hiding my running shoes is a bit cruel!), Brad has been keeping my spirits up and truly appreciate all of your kind thoughts and wishes for a speedy recovery. Unfortunately, I have a ways to go…not to mention now having to tear the house apart for my shoes…the race is this weekend!!!! Luckily, Brad has several posts in the hopper to fill the void. Take care everyone.
Take it away Brad…
Doesn’t that title remind you of a song from the hair bands of the 1980’s, MTV, and a specific lifeguard sitcom? Just try to get that out of your head while you read the story.
In the past, we at Intrigued have talked about “LBJ’s” (little brown jobbers). There should also be an acronym for the nearly endless variety of gulls. The company Brian and I used to work for had thousands of acronyms. There were so many . . . how many were there . . . there were so many acronyms that we had a spiral-bound notebook just to be able to keep track of them all. Whenever I see a seagull flying around, even this far inland in central Illinois, I think it’s just another seagull, or just another gull (JAG). The word “seagull” is a generic term for any gull-like bird near water. Many of the “gulls” I see on a regular basis are nowhere near a major body of water. I don’t normally take the time to tell the gulls apart. I usually just call it a seagull, remind myself to tag it later in Lightroom as a “gull”, and then move onto the business of enjoying the rest of our vacation.
On our recent winter trip to South Carolina, I was doing the same thing. Jan and I took photos of “gulls” we saw flying near the ocean. It wasn’t really until we took a walk on Sunset Beach that I realized “Hey, these don’t all look the same.” I thought, “Great, something else I need to identify when we get home.” And before anyone asks, I don’t think any of these were named Jonathon Livingston.
Hit the jump to see more gulls, gulls, gulls!
In reality, we ended up photographing three species of gull on this vacation: Bonaparte’s, ring-billed, and laughing gulls. I know exactly what you are thinking, but no, the Bonaparte’s gull isn’t named after Emperor Napolean. The Bonaparte’s gull is named after his nephew (or cousin depending on which source you read) Charles Lucien Bonaparte for his important contributions to American ornithology in the 1820s. And no to your second question, they didn’t have their right-hand wing tucked in their feathers.
Gull identification can be like trying to tell identical quadruplets apart from their school photos. A Bonaparte’s gull looks similar to a laughing gull which is similar to a Franklin’s gull. Leg color, bill color, and the size of the white eye ring are all primary clues. Secondary clues for me are: the white spots on the tail feathers, the color of the feathers on their backs, and how far up the neck the color continues. Another important identifier can be knowing who they hang out with. (I just ended a sentence with a preposition, please don’t tell my high school English teacher, sorry Mr. B.). The Sibley and Cornell web sites both made identification a bit easier. When all else fails, use the maps to see if that gull is even supposed to be in that area at that time of year. (Maps helped rule out a Franklin’s gull being in South Carolina). Or ask an expert if you have one handy. For example, I just ring up the A.I.D. (Avian Identification Department) at Intrigued Corporate for help.
I’m going to talk about the gulls in the order I mentioned them above: Bonaparte’s, ring-billed, then laughing.
A key feature of non-breeding adult Bonaparte’s gull (Chroicocephalus philadelphia), at least from the photos I was able to capture, are the dark “ear” spots on the sides of their heads. That and their orange-pink legs help tell them apart from other species. The white eye ring is rather thin in comparison to the laughing gull. Fun fact: Bonaparte’s gull are the only gull species that nest in trees.
We observed a behavior on Sunset Beach called “conveyor belt foraging.” It’s a most mesmerizing technique, often seen in the Great Lakes and both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
On this particular day, the skies were heavily overcast, looming low and ominous. There was a very strong wind driving sand and salt spray into our faces. The gulls did not seem deterred. A group of Bonaparte’s gulls would fly upwind (left to right as you are reading this), just above the water’s surface, dipping down to seize a small fish. As they reached the end of the food patch near the pier they fly upward, where the wind catches them, bringing them quickly to the end of the queue (right to left this time) where the process starts over. The wind was so strong that day that it seemed like only the Bonaparte’s gulls were brave enough to take flight. Even then, they were keeping low, right next to the sand on the upwind flights. If I didn’t know any better (and I probably don’t) I’d say they were having fun while grabbing an in-flight snack from time to time. We’d see them ride the wind back up the beach for a mile or two at high speed. A few minutes later, we’d see what looked like the same group flying low into the wind after starting the process all over again.
Ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis) adults on the other hand are pretty simple to identify. They have a black ring around their bill near the end leaving a tiny bit of yellow at the tip.
Older than juvenile, not quite adult, or second winter, ring-billed gulls have a grey/blue back, but are still brown spotted nearly everywhere else. They don’t quite have the distinctive ring on their bill yet.
Ring-billed gull parents will nest on sparsely vegetated ground (sandbars, rocky beaches, bare rock) near fresh water. These gull colonies can have as few as twenty, or as many as tens of thousands of nesting pairs. Many will choose to nest in the same colony where they hatched.
Adult ring-billed gulls will sometimes “play” by dropping an object mid-flight and then diving to catch it. We didn’t see any “playing” or flying on this very windy day.
I think this one was making fun of me trying to get a steady photo in 20MPH winds with blowing sand and salt spray.
Which leads us to our next exhibit for today.
Adult laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla) have a black head, reddish bill and reddish legs (when not badly underexposed or backlit). Their white eye ring is thicker than the adult Bonaparte’s gull. They can often be seen, well, laughing. They look very similar to a Franklin’s gull, but the territories don’t overlap anywhere near South Carolina
Non-breeding adults are a bit easier to tell apart from the Bonaparte’s gull.
A non-breeding laughing gull has the partially black head feathers, while the Bonaparte’s has only the ear spots mentioned above. The bill is also larger on a laughing gull than on a Bonaparte’s gull, which is almost dainty in comparison.
Both laughing gull parents will build a nest together. They carefully select a location on sand, rocks, or somewhere else hidden among leaves of low plants. Laughing gull nests are located on slightly elevated spots to minimize the chance of flooding by storms or high tides. Despite the name, they are serious parents, keeping the nest free of egg shell fragments that might stick to unhatched eggs, preventing them from hatching. Laughing gulls are monogamous breeders with pairs sticking together, sometimes for several breeding seasons.
I think this one really wanted me to leave.
Thank you for reading. If you want to see more bird photos from our South Carolina winter escape, please visit here.
Credits
Thanks again to Jan and Allyson for proofreading and editing. Thanks to Jan for many of the photos in this article.
Life Intrigued 