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THE GULL OF MY DREAMS

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog called WHEN IS A BLACKBIRD NOT A BLACKBIRD. In that piece I tried to show just how difficult it can be to identify a living, active bird when all you have to compare it against is a stationary picture in a guide book. Invariably the picture will show the species in clear side profile and perfect adult breeding plumage. That's a world away from the scabby juvenile individual that you might get the most fleeting rear view glimpse of as it dives into a bush.

If it's that difficult to sort out songbirds from one another, imagine how hard it is to identify the most confusing kind of birds; gulls. It's as if they've deliberately evolved to make them as difficult as possible to distinguish from one another. I'm rubbish at it, to the point that I sometimes don't even try. I look at a lake full of birds and go, “gull, gull, gull, gull... ooh, a swan”. I'm excited by anything that isn't a seagull (and as we all know, there's no such thing as a 'seagull').

So it's with a bit of trepidation that I present a list of eight gulls that have graced us with their presence at RSPB Old Moor over the last week or so. Brace yourself, this could get messy.

BLACK-HEADED GULL – A gull with a dark chocolate brown head. Very common. There are thousands currently at our reserve.

MEDITERRANIAN GULL – A gull with a black head that isn't a Black-Headed Gull. Really. They look incredibly similar but if you see one of these beside a so-called Black-Head, the Med Gull is the one with the blacker-than-black head.

LESSER BLACK-BACKED GULL – A big gull with dark wings and a red spot on its nose. Steals chicks. Unpopular with other birds.

GREAT BLACK-BACKED GULL – A very, very big gull with very, very dark wings and a red spot on its nose. Steals lots of chicks. Very unpopular with other birds.

HERRING GULL – Common chip-and-ice-cream-cone thief. Known for its annoying screech and red spot on its nose.

YELLOW-LEGGED GULL – I'll let you guess what sets this one apart from other gulls. Clue: it's legs are the same colour as those of the Common Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed.

COMMON GULL – Not quite as common as you'd imagine. American's call it the Mew Gull, presumably because it sounds a bit like a cat, if you squint and really want it to. Delicate and tidy with a clean white head.

CASPIAN GULL – They're all called Casper. That's about the extent of my knowledge apart from they look a lot like many other gulls currently on the mere. If you really need to identify one, ask an expert. In this case, that isn't me.

It can be hard enough to sort this lot out, even if they're in their perfect breeding colours and posing patiently out of the water so that you can get a good look at their legs, tails, wings and heads, all at the same time. That's rarely going to happen, not in the real world. Add to that the fact that gulls have a nasty tendency to live longer than passerines so have time to go through various changes of plumage throughout their equivalent of teenage years. And most of them look very different in the winter months to summer. Right now most of them are in the middle of doing a Jekyll and Hyde metamorphosis from one seasonal colouration to another. So even if you've studied hard and learned every gull's costume changes throughout all their age groups and at all times of year, the odds are that you're going to be caught out in this intermediate halfway house seasonal stage.

It is, quite frankly, a nightmare. Personally I stick to the few that I can definitely (possibly) identify at a specific time of year and then, if I see something out of the ordinary, I wait until there's an update by someone who knows better on Twitter or on our sightings boards. Comparing what I've seen against what others claim they saw gives me a fighting chance at an ID. Honestly, that's usually my safest bet. The sightings board is your friend.

Thankfully there have been many other species seen at Old Moor recently that aren't gulls. I'll close, as always, with our current sightings board. Have fun trying to see the birds listed. But keep your chips covered, just in case.