Okay, yesterday I took a photo of seagull at a Reykjavik cafê, but its legs weren’t visible, and birders beefed that they couldn’t identify it with assurance unless they saw the color of its legs. Here’s that photo:
Well, walking back to my guesthouse after my all-day tour today, I saw another gull going nuts over an entire breadroll that someone had discarded. This time I could photograph the whole bird, and here it is (two shots):
So, you birders, two questions:
a. Did I see the same species twice? (Looks the same to me.)
and
b. Now that you see its yellow legs, what is the species?
The first person who identifies it correctly gets my warm congratulations. Since I don’t know the species, I’ll have to count on several birders verifying the ID in the comments.
Get on it!
Boy meets gull is an old pun. Or, as I like to say, one good tern deserves another.
Toucan play that game!
Q: Why do seagulls like to live by the sea?
A: Because if they lived by the bay they would be baygulls! [bagels]
Good ones! 😺
😀
From Duck.ai:
When seagulls tell jokes, they really wing it!
(Not yet ready for prime time. But give ’em a few years.)
If boy doesn’t meet gull, then…
it’s boy meets gall.
I propose a moratorium on bird puns from heron out.
Not until I’ve had a tern
This is hard… It looks like a Yellow-legged Gull but those have not been recorded in Iceland. Herring gulls in Iceland have some variation in the amount of yellow in their legs but not such bright yellow:
http://www.jeaniron.ca/Gulls/2016/Ice/ihgulls.htm
Fascinating! ln the UK there is very little difference in Herring Gull wing patterns. The ones with the lighter outer primaries in your link would look very much out of place here.
The Lesser Black-backed Gull mentioned below by other commenters seems right, better than my guesses.
I agree. This is most probably a lesser black-backed gull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_black-backed_gull#/media/File:Larus-fuscus-taxbox.jpg
Even I can see it’s got yellow legs.
The familiar-to-me distinctive American Herring gull is Larus smithsonianus or Larus argentatus smithsonianus, but I just learned there’s a European Herring Gull as well Larus argentatus… basically the same name?… breeding in Iceland… all that is from searching Google and Wikipedia.
I note as trivia argent refers to the metal silver (atomic symbol Ag). Makes sense – the gray or silvery coloration…
Looks like a Lesser Black-backed gull – Larus fuscus.
And yes, I think you saw the same species twice.
Kevin Krebs gets the warm congratulations for being the first person to identify the bird (at least according to consensus).
CONGRATULATIONS!
Just to be clear: it is not necessary to see the leg colour in order to identify Lesser Black-backed Gull. This species can be told from the shade of the back and wings, provided the light is “true” and, in a photo, the exposure is correct (which is the case in your excellent original pic) and from the relatively slender shape of the bill and of the whole bird (Great Black-backed Gulls are stocky bruisers with heavy bills). That being said, it’s always nice of course to see the leg colour for confirmation. And, without leg colour, you pretty much have to have experience with the species and with gulls in general to make the identification with confidence.
The above pertains to adult birds. Immatures are a different story. Dealing with immature gulls takes identification challenges to a whole new level of difficulty.
Lesser Black-backed – adult
I agree with Lesser Black-backed gull.
Looks like a Lesser Black-Backed Gull in my Birds of North America.
In the UK this species is called the lesser black backed gull (Larus fuscus). Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) have a lighter grey back and flesh coloured legs.
What most fascinates me about these birds is that they are a ring species. As you move one way round the world the grey backs on the lbb gulls gets lighter and as you go the other way the herring gulls’ backs get darker until, as I understand it, on the other side of the world they are all the same colour and the two taxa cannot be distinguished. So according to the biological species concept this is just one species, despite the different binomial identifiers.
I should have made clear that “round the world” meant in an east/west direction. You obviously don’t get herring gulls in the Sahara or in the Brazilian rainforest.
I have a pet theory (which has no scientific basis that I am aware of) for why the ring species evolved in the way it did. On Walney Island, near where I live, there used to be the largest mixed colony of herring/lbb gulls in Europe. (I say “used to be” because there was a household waste landfill site near the colony which helped to sustain it. When this was closed down many of the gulls moved into our town where they nest on the rooftops, some of them on the houses of our neighbours, where they are safe from terrestrial predators but the fledglings are not safe from passing cars, and, only last week, one met its demise on the road outside our house.) When I was a boy I used to visit the colony on Walney, and for a while I contributed to a ringing scheme where I sponsored individual llb gulls. And one gull I sponsored was found to have migrated to Portugal. As I understand it, herring gulls do not migrate. So what we have in Europe is two “species” occupying two ecological niches. If gulls are a coastal species they can make a living both by staying nearby, or alternatively by migrating south for the winter. I suspect this system would work in the same way on the eastern and western American seaboards and the far eastern Pacific seaboard. But for the thousands of miles of North Siberian coastline there would be no opportunity for a coastal species to migrate south: one niche – one species. I don’t know how well this hypothesis stacks up with the evidence but it makes sense to me.
Just one more comment: My interest in birds led me to reading “The Herring Gull’s World”, by ethologist, Nobel Laureate and Dawkins mentor at Oxford, Niko Tinbergen, when I was a nerdy 14 year old, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the book changed my life. By that time I already knew that evolution had happened, and the book made me ask the question, if species were so precisely adapted for survival, what about other animal species, for example this one: the human one. This was the spark of a different way of thinking that to me writing my novels – which so far have proved to be unpublishable too different perhaps – and ultimately to my podcast series (available ad-free on my website at http://www.peterdfisher.com)
There was also a BBC documentary, called “Signals for Survival”, made on Walney, by Tinbergen based on his book. Sadly I can’t find the original documentary on the net, but it was remade in America. One difference, however, is that the colony in the US where the remake was made consisted of herring gulls and great black-backs, a much bigger bird than the lbb (herrings and lbbs are roughly the same size). While there was a small population of gbbs on Walney almost all were lbbs and the original documentary, as I remember, discussed those two species exclusively.
Here’s the remake:
I just love those yellow legs! Perfect accent for the beak.
Lesser black-backed gull
Here in Bristol, we have far too many herring gulls and black backed gulls. They prey on the food of tourists and the young of other water fowl.
The same is true for the German coasts of the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Tourism authorities, restaurants and snack bars are urgently warning visitors not to leave the fish sandwich out of sight. Otherwise pickled herring or fried fish will quickly end up in the stomachs of seagulls.