Thursday, February 19, 2009

International Gull Meeting

On Wednesday I'm going to the International Gull Meeting (IGM) in Peterhead, Scotland. In the evenings, several people will have talks and in the days there will be gull watching. The IGM is from Feb 26th to March 1st but I will stay in Peterhead until the 4th, for the gulls. If I get access to the Internet I'll update this blog continously while in Scotland!

You'll find more information about the meeting here.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Complete juvenile HGs

Just for notification there are still a few complete juvenile Herring Gulls in Köping. To the left you can see one of those from the 12th of February. On that day there were two juveniles on the rubbish dump, of 300 birds in total.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Herring x Glaucous hybrid?









Update: Press here to see a movie of the bird.

On the first of February I saw the strange 2cy gull again. It gave an entirely different impression than last time (when I didn't have any other gull close by and it dissappeared shortly after I spotted it). The wing was "medium long" with the distance tertial tip - tail tip the same as tip of tail - tip of longest primary. The bird was a bit smaller than the Herring Gulls and appeared quite cute. The body was very homogeneous in colour with a slight red hue. The bill was dark with a hint of pink from the base to the nostrils on upper mandible and a little less on the lower one.

When flying, the darkest parts of the wing were outer primaries and the secondaries. Around three outer primaries were quite dark but then the primaries lightened up quickly inwards with just faint dark markings on the tips. The inner primaries looked almost completely light. I haven't seen the underwing exept for the axillaries once, they looked quite dark and evenly coloured.

As you can see in the last image the tail has a broad black bar that remains broad far towards the sides. In the image when the bird is raising the wings you can see that the black doesn't cover the outer rectrices all the way in. You can also see that the rump is quite dark and barred.

The eye is black looking.

Please write a comment!