ID-FRONTIERS for January 17-23, 2010

Messages are displayed in the order they were received.  Subject  From  Date   Time   Herring Gull gallery   Kevin McGowan    Sat, 23 Jan 2010   7:16pm

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Subject: Herring Gull gallery
From: Kevin McGowan <kjm2(AT)CORNELL.EDU>
Date: 23 Jan 2010 7:16pm

Last week a friend lent me her new Canon digital SLR with a 
moderately long lens (250mm).  It was my first chance to photograph 
birds by other than digiscoping in the last 10 years, and it was my 
first experience with a digital SLR.  The big excitement for me was 
shooting flying birds.  (I took over 3,000 photos in the first 
weekend.)  I used the opportunity to try to document some of the 
variability in Herring Gulls that visit central New York in 
winter.  I have put a number of shots at 
http://picasaweb.google.com/KevinJ.McGowan/HerringGullsInIthaca. 
These were all taken over 2 days at the Cornell compost facility east 
of Ithaca (I will be adding some more from the next weekend, eventually).

I have been working at this particular facility for over 10 years 
now, mainly looking for marked crows for my long-term study.  In the 
last 5 years or so we have had a bonanza of different gull species 
occurring there, recording Ring-billed Gull, Laughing Gull (1x), 
fly-over Bonaparte's, Herring Gull (including some European-looking 
individuals), Iceland Gull (ca. dozen yearly), Thayer's Gull (at 
least 5 1cy), Lesser Black-backed Gull (ca. 10 yearly), Great 
Black-backed Gull, Slaty-backed Gull (2 adults), Glaucous Gull (ca. 
2-3 yearly), and hybrids Herring x Glaucous (Nelson's), Herring x 
Lesser Black-backed, and possibly others.

Herring Gulls breed in New York state, but not in the near vicinity 
of Ithaca.  From reading band numbers we know that we get some from 
breeding colonies along the St. Lawrence River and from Maine.  Where 
else they come from, I don't know.

I see a huge amount of variation in adults in terms of dark head 
markings, bill markings, and pattern of dark in the wings.  We see 
individuals with the underside of the wingtips as dark as Ring-billed 
Gulls and some as white as Thayer's.  I posted some examples of 
adults a while ago at 
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/HEGUadults.htm.  Whether the 
extremes represents variation within a single breeding unit or the 
occurrence of several different and distinct clusters from disparate 
locations is unknown.

The examples posted at 
http://picasaweb.google.com/KevinJ.McGowan/HerringGullsInIthaca are 
not a random sample; they are essentially birds that flew past my car 
close enough to be photographed and at the right angle for sunlight 
to illuminate them under the wings.  I tried to exclude multiple 
pictures of the same individual.  I did not include multiple photos 
from the same sequence, but I will not guarantee that the same 
individuals are not represented more than once.  I have thousands of 
digiscoped photos of immature Herring Gulls showing an incredible mix 
of characters from past years, but, oddly, right now we have 
primarily adult Herrings present, and they represent the bulk of what 
I have posted.

Kevin

*****************************************************
Kevin J. McGowan
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca, NY 14850
kjm2(AT)cornell.edu
http://birds.cornell.edu/crows/

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