On Sunday morning at about 10:00am, Henry Gilmore and I had a 5 or so minute
look at a gull sitting on the water at a distance of maybe 120 meters. We
cannot ID the bird, so if you're a gull aficionado (Mary Anne, feel free to
chip in here), pls give us your thoughts. At one point, we took our eyes
off the bird to greet some approaching birders and when we looked back, the
bird was gone! We stayed around the area for an hour or so, but never saw
the bird again. We didn't see much, but here's what we saw:

o This was either a juvenile or a non-breeding adult. The distant was too
great to tell which.

o The bird was roughly in the mid-range to larger end of the black- (note
small "b") headed gulls.

o The bird was very buoyant and floated quite high in the water.

o The bird's feeding technique was somewhat similar to a phalarope in that
it picked whatever it was eating off the surface of the water while
turning in circles. But much slower turning than a phalarope does.

o Another phalarope connection is that it had a thick "comma" line
extending back from the eye and then turning downward.. Very similar in
shape to the juvenile and adult non-breeding Red-necked Phalarope's eye
marking as shown on page 195 of the 'big' Sibley--except that the downward
portion of the eye marking was roughly of equal length to the portion
extending backward.

o The bill was completely black and was larger (both length and girth)
than any black-headed gull sp. in my reference books but one.

o The only other face or head marking was an ill-defined (ie. fuzzy at the
edges) but rather large black ear spot. The spot was much larger than the
spot on any gull in any of my books.

That's about all we could see given the distance. No views of the bird
in flight so no details regarding the wing tips or wing pattern. And
unfortunately, no photos were obtained.

We do have an uneducated guess as to the bird's ID, but being not at all
confident of our guess, for the moment I'm withholding it. I'll be glad to
email the guess to anyone who's interested. Whatever it turns out to be,
this is clearly a bird of some interest to PNW birders.

Good birding, Mike

--
Michael Marsh
Portland, OR