Dear Tweeters,

Today, after a jolly field trip led by Phil Wright to Rosario Head, I looked at some gulls on Samish and Butler Flats (Skagit County).

At Allen ballfields was an immature Glaucous Gull, in a flock of about fifteen mostly Glaucous-winged Gulls. This site is along Chuckanut Drive, right across the road and west of W.D. Foods, the little grocery store for the area, at Sam Bell Road.

A few minutes later, I found a flock of about 200 mostly Glaucous-winged Gulls at the extreme west end of Dahlstedt Road (NE of the Cook Road-Interstate 5 interchange, at Exit 232, in a field between the railroad tracks and Old Highway 99). A second immature GLAUCOUS GULL was here, with a slightly different pattern of flecking compared to the other bird.

Also with this big flock was at least one good THAYER's GULL.

To my question. At both locations, there were small numbers of gulls that looked somewhat like Herring Gulls, but I was not sure about them. There was one of them at Allen, and two or three at Dahlstedt. They fit the illustration of a "vega" American Herring Gull in Sibley quite well, but I don't know if that's what they were. I don't even know if those occur here. These were large, pink-legged gulls, with large yellow bills sporting a single red spot. The bills were heavy and rather "blob-ended," with good gonydeal angle. They each had fairly dark mantles, but I am sure they were not Westerns or WEGU X GWGU hybrids. They had a lot of dark winter marking on the white heads, ruling out pure Westerns. They had pale irides, of a yellowish color. The pattern on the underside of the wingtips best matched that of an American Herring Gull, with too much dark for a Thayer's, but not enough for a Western or for the GWGU X WEGU hybrids that I am used to seeing.
All in all, the birds seemed like American Herring Gulls in every way, except for the too-dark mantle, and perhaps also in a subtle difference in jizz.

So, of course, most Tweeters don't want to wade through all that text and try to tell me what I saw. "Show us a photo," they'll say, but I don't have a camera.

Is there a good website full of gull photos that would be useful for birders in Washington? I have still not upgraded my birding library from my old Grant gull book.

Thanks,

Gary Bletsch

Is there



Gary Bletsch ? Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA ? garybletsch at yahoo.com ? ?