>The goyns was scarcely noticeable.

A fairly straight bill with little gonydeal angle is not unusual at all for
Glaucous, even for large-end birds. I don't know why this keeps
getting mentioned.

>White it is true that the western Canadian Glaucous Gull race barrovianus
is
somewhat smaller on average (and slightly darker mantled) than nominate
Glaucous (and said to sometime show a red orbital ring), it should be noted
that the Glaucous Gulls we normally see in Washington are presumably of that
race. In my experience they are always as big as Glaucous-winged Gulls and
certainly larger than Herring.

There is a HUGE range of size variation for all of these species. It
may be that the smallest Glaucous-winged are always smaller than
the smallest Glaucous, but otherwise there is a large area of documented
overlap in size range. The notion that Glaucous is never smaller than
Glaucous-winged (without qualifications) is clearly false. I believe there
is also documented size overlap between small Alaskan Glaucous and
Herring cited going all the way back to Grant, and there is a statement
in O & L about small female barrovianus looking like a "Herring head
on an Iceland body", which is a confusing image but makes the point
about how small Alaskan Glaucous can be.

Also I think it's a pretty big assumption to imply that all, or even almost
all of Pacific NW wintering Glaucous necessarily come from Alaskan
breeding areas. A significant percentage may be moving SW from
Canada. This is obviously the case with many species that prefer the
ocean in winter including Thayer's, and likely also thousands of inland-
nesting Herrings. There's no reason to assume our NW "sample"
wintering Glaucous isn't a mix from different areas.

>In any case, I would argue that the bill of
the bird in question is far too short and "dainty" for even the smallest
Glaucous.

Photos of similar-billed Glaucous are not hard to find. There are
a few very close in O & L (birds from Japan), and it's not that hard
to Google images of relatively small-billed Glaucous. They do exist.
Conversely nominate glaucoides are almost always obviously
smaller-billed than Herring, and this bird's bill is probably about
average for Herring, if not slightly larger than average (based on
direct comparison with the Glaucous-winged).

Cheers,

Phil