California gull

In spite of its name, the California gull is found elsewhere besides the state it is named after. This one was photographed on the east coast of Vancouver Island near Nanaimo, BC. It turns out there are a lot of them on the prairies; in fact Idaho's state bird is the California gull. The story regarding this odd choice goes back to the mid-1800s when farmers were plagued with millions of locusts. The salvation, it turned out, was a large population of California gulls that took care of the pests and saved the crops. Since then the birds have held legendary status and have received the state's highest honor - being named state bird.

I have never been fond of identifying gulls. The reason is simple enough; one species often has four or five different plumage configurations. There are always the first and second year plumages, some gulls even have a different colouration for a third and fourth year as well. Then there are the breeding, summer, and winter plumages. That doesn't even address the differences between sexes. However, gulls do have a few identification characteristics in their favour.

Leg colour is a big part of the identification process. Gulls can have yellow, red, black, orange, pink, or greenish coloured legs. Likewise, bills can be different colours or be festooned with coloured patches or a ring going around the bill near its tip. The iris of the eye may be a particular color and, in the case of the California gull, there may be an eye-ring. Although these tend to be modestly stable morphological constants to reference when identifying, there still seems to be some variation.

If, indeed this is a California gull, why is there not the yellow and black lower bill markings? The eye-ring on my photo of this bird seems prevelant and yet it was not so in many of the images I looked up in books and on-line. Younger gulls may not develop the red spot until they are of breeding age.

The red spot on a gull's bill is interesting. It is encoded within the chick to peck at anything red. When a chick pecks at the spot the adult regurgitates food which the youngster quickly ingests. Without the red spot on the adult's bill the chicks would starve. That same red spot is found on all adult gulls regardless of species. It seems that it is a button that the chicks just have to push. Human infants have their own sets of ingrained behaviours that allow them to develop, and the parents have preset reflexes to those behaviours. The difference is that, as adults, we can exercise the will to exhibit them, modify them, or extinguish them all together.

Thanks for reading.     Ericspix     Eric Svendsen