#Larus glaucescens

[ethanm8n]

Second-third cycle Olympic Gull.

(Vancouver BC, April 26 2024)

[dailybaileyphotography]

Glaucous-winged Gull

Larus glaucescens

[bestgullpoll]

Round 2, Side B: Match 36

[Image ID: Two pictures of gulls. The left is a glaucous-winged gull standing on the edge of a wooden dock. The right is a swallow-tailed gull standing on a rock. /End ID]

The glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens) is a large gull found on the coasts of far eastern Russia and western North America. They typically measure 50-68 cm (20-27 in) in length and 120-150 cm (47-59 in) in wingspan. They have white underparts and head, silver-grey upperparts and wings with white spots at the tips, pink legs, and yellow bill with red spot. Where their range overlaps with the western gull in the northern continental United States, they hybridize so frequently with the western gull that the hybrids ("Olympic gulls") are more common than either species. They feed on fish, invertebrates, small mammals and birds, and carrion.

The swallow-tailed gull (Creagrus furcatus) is a large gull found on the Galápagos Islands and off the coast of South America. When not breeding, they are completely pelagic. They typically measure 51-61 cm (20-24 in) in length and 124-139 cm (49-55 in) in wingspan. They have a black head, bright red eye rings, black bill with white tip, light grey upper breast, red legs, grey back and upper wings, and white forked tail. The rest of their wings are white, except for the tips which are black. They are the only fully nocturnal gull and seabird in the world, feeding on squid and small fish which come to the surface at night to feed on plankton.

glaucous-winged gull image by Dick Daniels

swallow-tailed gull image by Benjamint444

[birdidentifier]

BIRD IDENTIFIED: Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens)

[birdygotback]

Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens)

© Bob Gunderson

[no-pigment-no-problem]

Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens)

© Bob Gunderson

[maritimeorca]

From the archives Via Flickr: Gull at Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge

[avianeurope]

Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens) >>by Mark Sawyer

[typhlonectes]

A greedy Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens) scoops up Pacific Herring (Clupea pallasii) in Oak Bay, British Columbia, Canada.

photograph by Liam Ragan | Inaturalist

[ethanm8n]

Gulls

March 19, 2024

“I was mugged by a gang of seagulls” reads the title of a Tripadvisor review for Granville Island1. “When I came outdoors [a] gang of seagulls attacked me and stole part of my lunch.” Anyone who has eaten a meal outside of the Granville Island Public Market will understand this frustration. Seagulls watch like sentinels from rooftops, above benches and dining tables, on the lookout for a loose pizza slice; grey-coloured seagulls beg near sitting diners, screeching incessantly. Some seagulls patrol the skies above, while others choose to stay close to the ground, walking around on webbed-feet, waiting for loose food items and handouts. It would be easy to overlook these birds as a nuisance—rats with wings, to quote the pelican from Finding Nemo. They may be kleptoparasites, stealing food from other animals, including lunching humans and unsuspecting tourists. But seagulls are so much more than just ratbirds. In the Salish Sea region, they humble the proudest of birders trying to make an ID. (Is that light grey-mantled gull with darkish grey wingtips a Western x Glaucous-winged Gull hybrid or a darker Glaucous-winged Gull? Does the slightly smaller, petite head indicate hybridization with a Herring Gull, or is it a female of another species? Is its eye colour dark or pale? How about the colour of the orbital rings?) Their increasing reliance on urban breeding grounds (e.g. rooftops) serves as a litmus test for habitat degradation, and also gives researchers an opportunity to study how fauna adapt to urban living. How does the diet of an urban dwelling Glaucous-winged Gull Larus glaucescens differ from one that spends its time in more remote areas? Do urban seagulls lay more or less eggs than their counterparts? What is the survival rate of their young in to adulthood? Researchers have been hard at work answering these questions2. One recent study flew drones above buildings in Victoria to study nest sites of Glaucous-winged Gulls, a wonderful example of new technology opening up more avenues for scientific inquiry3.

Before going further, I need to address a misnomer. Gulls belong to a diverse group of birds in the family Laridae, from the circumpolar, all white Ivory Gull Pagophila eburnea, to the grey-bodied Lava Gull Leucophaeus fuliginosus and coal-black backed Olrog's Gull Larus atlanticus in South America. (Melanin—the pigment responsible for skin colour in humans—is what gives darker tones to feathers. It helps resist sun bleaching, which is why gull species's upper bodies trend towards darker tones closer to the equator4.) The Heermann's Gull Larus heermanni is a true pelagic (literally “ocean”) species, individuals spending their days hunting for fish, rarely going inland. Then there is the California Gull Larus californicus, which breeds inland of the Western United States; and the Ring-billed Gull Larus delewarensis, prolific in most of North America, but rarely straying beyond coastal waters5. This is why you will almost never hear birders refer to seagulls as such. Many gulls are generalists, found in urban centres, prairies, rivers and lakes, landfills, open oceans and coastlines. Calling them seagulls would be a disservice to their enterprising nature, breeding on every continent, including on the fringes of Antartica. Many of these species have adapted to living in rapidly expanding human-made habits. We can conflate this success with the annoyance conjured up in many people's minds when they think of these birds: Their pervasiveness; their loud squawking; the mess they make with their guano; and their proclivity towards thievery. Perhaps the things humans find so irritating about gulls are actually what we hold most in common. But I digress. No birder or ornithologist worth their salt is going to call you out for saying seagull instead of gull. (If they do, they will bring it up benignly.) Gulls as a label in itself is taxonomically ambiguous, pertaining to several genera within the Laridae family while excluding terns, skimmers and noddies. Instead of splitting feathers over vernacular, try learning about local gulls in your neighbourhood (if you have any.) Download an app like Merlin or Audubon for quick reference if you stumble upon an interesting bird. Your local gull species may not have the vocal acumen of a Song Sparrow Melospiza melodia, nor the fantastically coloured plumage of a Wood Duck Aix Sponsa. For me at least, I find tremendous enjoyment in watching a second winter Olympic Gull walk past me, a collage of grey and brown and white; or seeing a first winter individual staring at me with those deep and dusky eyes, its first grey scapulars developing, like ash on a dirt road. Gulls are full of personality. I observe them trying to snatch fish from cormorants; pulling up worms from park grass; standing on volleyball pegs and tidal rocks, heads tucked in behind their backs and bodies rotating side to side as if to lull themselves asleep. Even the seemingly normal, mundane, sometimes irritating aspects of life can offer up wonders if you are patient. Gulls or otherwise.

References:

“I Was Mugged by a Gang of Seagulls – Granville Island, Vancouver Traveller Reviews – Tripadvisor.” Tripadvisor, 2011, www.tripadvisor.ca/ShowUserReviews-g154943-d156255-r120159573-GranvilleIsland-VancouverBritish_Columbia.html.

Edward Kroc. “Reproductive Ecology of Urban-Nesting Glaucous-Winged Gulls Larus glaucescens in Vancouver, BC, Canada.” Marine Ornithology, vol. 46, 2018, pp. 155–16.

Louise K. Blight, Douglas F. Bertram, Edward Kroc. “Evaluating UAV-based techniques to census an urban-nesting gull population on Canada’s Pacific coast.” Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, vol. 7(4), 2019, pp. 312-324. https://doi.org/10.1139/juvs-2019-0005

Steve N.G. Howel, Jon Dunn. “Peterson Reference Guides to Gulls of the Americas.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007, p. 25.

Birds of the World, https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow

[redhawk0123]

ワシカモメ 第4回冬羽 Larus glaucescens 4th winter

ワシカモメ 第1回冬羽 Larus glaucescens 1st winter

2020.01.25 Choshi, Chiba pref. JAPAN

[dailybaileyphotography]

Glaucous-winged Gull; Larus glaucescens

American Crow; Corvus brachyrhynchos

[avianphotography-blog]

Ring-billed Gull - Larus delawarensis (Top two photos)

Various Gull Species including Ring-billed Gull, Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens), and possibly other species of California Gull (Larus californicus), Western Gull (Larus occidentalis), or hybridized Gulls. 

Date & Time - July 24, 2019 at 1:44 pm

Latitude & Longitude - 47.043278, -122.908360

Weather - 81 degrees Fahrenheit, wind 2 mph SW, .0 inches of precipitation.

[ravelite]

Glaucous (from the Latin glaucus, meaning "bluish-grey or green", from the Greek Γλαῦκος glaukós) is used to describe the pale grey or bluish-green appearance of the surfaces of some plants, as well as in the names of birds, such as the glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus), glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens), glaucous macaw (Anodorhynchus glaucus), and glaucous tanager (Thraupis glaucocolpa). The term glaucous is also used botanically as an adjective to mean "covered with a greyish, bluish, or whitish waxy coating or bloom that is easily rubbed off" (e.g. glaucous leaves).

Glaucous - Wikipedia

[maritimeorca]

From the archives Via Flickr: Gull at Point Defiance Park

[dendroica]

Glaucous-winged Gull Population Reflects 100 Years of Ecological Change

Fluctuations in the population of Glaucous-winged Gulls (Larus glaucescens) in British Columbia’s Georgia Basin reflect a series of ecological changes over the course of the twentieth century, as demonstrated in a new paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications. Louise Blight, Mark Drever, and Peter Arcese of the University of British Columbia collected all available population counts of gulls in the basin from 1900 to 2010 and created a demographic model that revealed major changes in the gulls’ population over the decades in response to elimination of egg harvesting, recovery of Bald Eagles after the banning of DDT, and changes in food availability.

When ecologists track changes in wildlife populations, the question of what’s “normal” for those populations is important to consider, but this can be hard to determine over a short period of time. With this in mind, Dr. Blight and her colleagues assembled a very long-term data set to see how gull populations fluctuated over many years. “In latter years the data were mainly collected in the field by professional biologists, but a number of the early colony counts were carried out by natural history buffs, lighthouse keepers, and so on,” explains Blight. “A lot of those data were subsequently compiled into reports, but some of them were still just sitting on card files or other paper notes and stored away in dusty museum filing cabinets when we found them.”

Starting from a low point at the turn of the twentieth century, gull population counts increased over the following decades and peaked in the 1980s before beginning to decline again. The harvesting of eggs had seriously depleted gull numbers before being banned by the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, with naturalists of the time describing Georgia Basin islands as “systematically robbed” and “clean of eggs.” In the decades following the treaty, the population was able to recover, increasingly rapidly over the following seventy years. In the 1980s, however, greater numbers of Bald Eagles (a gull predator) and the decreasing abundance of fish in the area caused gull populations to drop again, ultimately decreasing to about 50% of peak levels by 2010.

Because gulls sit in the middle of the food chain and will eat almost anything, they can be an important indicator of what’s going on in the broader ecosystem. “As generalists they should be able to buffer a relatively high degree of food web change. If, despite that, they are experiencing a population decline, they may be telling us that there have been some fairly profound changes to local marine ecosystems,” says Blight. For over a century, humans have been shaping the population dynamics of British Columbia’s Glaucous-winged Gulls, and over a hundred years of environmental history are encapsulated in their ups and downs.

(via Auk & Condor Updates)