Piping au naturale

Earlier in the week someone found a non-banded Piping Plover at New Buffalo.  After an unsuccessful half-hearted attempt was made to see it in a windstorm yesterday a return was made today.  The bird wasn't apparent initially.  A few of us started walking up the main beach and came across the well-celebrated dark-mantled hybrid, and possible Chandeleur Gull, in the gull flock.  I was slow getting settings off of yesterday's overcast and didn't get them straightened out until the bird was settling back down as we worked our way north.

There's actually a partial Slaty-backed like string of pearls on a couple of the feathers with a very small mirror on P10.  Kelp Gull is often guessed as one of the bird's parents, a guess supported by the small P10 spot. 

A look at the heavy gony angle and weird yellow-gray legs.

On the way back to the car a walker suddenly put the Piping into motion.  It must have been invisibly hunkered down on the walk out.

I walked ahead of it and sure enough the bird walked up towards me.

While the bands are necessary for researchers to keep track of the birds, it was fun to see one without them.  This one's narrow breastband completely encircles the throat.

The apex predators of Berrien Co

Beware, the Lesser White Shark:

 Don't worry, it's actually just a Bonaparte's Gull

 Which is probably bad advice to give a minnow...

Bald Eagles are the real enemy when trying to sort through the New Buffalo gull flock.

 This one was circling the harbor which led to a nice concentration of gulls ... a mile out on the lake.

New Buffalo has at times had good numbers of gulls and many people have come to look for the California that's been seen sporadically.  I've been hoping to get some decent Thayer's portraits (actually I've been hoping to get some decent Mew portraits), but this Glaucous was one of just a couple I've seen this fall.

And surely no one gets tired of drinking in the beauty of Gull-nasty.

Columbus Day Gull-nasty

He's Back.  For the severalth consecutive year.  This bird usually appears in September in the north and central part of the county before working its way slowly south and hanging out some in New Buffalo and then mostly northern Indiana by the time winter rolls around.  This bird is frequently claimed as a Chandeleur Gull (a Kelp x Herring population that survived for a decade or so in the Gulf of Mexico on some little islands that were wiped out in a hurricane).  The Louisiana ornithologists who studied the Chandeleur Island birds say it isn't one.

I emailed Al Jaramillo last year about it who thought Great Black-backed x Lesser Black-backed would be more consistent with its appearance, with the obvious caveat that likely it's impossible to prove.

The bird was up close in New Buffalo and that explanation makes a lot of sense.

 The bird has a mantle shade that would seem appropriate for GBBGxLBBG (and darker than the majority of Chandeleur gulls which had the full gamut of mantle color between Kelp black and Herring gray).  The legs are very long.  This bird is always taller than Herring Gulls.  I've never thought the grayish-bland leg coloring (with pink webs) was that inappropriate for crossing a pink-legged bird with a yellow-legged bird.

A close-up of the head.  It has the heavy gony angle of GBBG and the brilliant orange spot of LBBG.  The gape of both Herring and Kelp is yellow, this bird's is definitely not yellow.  GBBG and LBBG have red and red-orange gapes respectively per Sibley.

 The head streaking could probably be explained by either combination.

Another shot of the spreadwing.

I've gone feather-by-feather down the spreadwing in the past.  Here's the link to the Louisiana paper describing the Chandeleur birds, there's a good description of the spreadwings of their birds inside.

Gull-nasty 2014 ... with an answer???

Guess who's back.  Back again.  Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back...

Tall and rangy, triangular headed, nearly Great Black-backed backed, long gray-green legged, Gull-nasty dropped down for a visit at New Buffalo.

It's got at least a partial string of pearls.  P8 is moulting in (along with a bunch of secondaries)

Here's my other close-range spread-wing of the bird (from at least a month earlier in the calendar year)

[addendum:  I emailed Alvaro Jaramillo about the bird, here's his response:
The bird does indeed have an outward look of a Kelp Gull, or at least part Kelp Gull. But it is clearly not a pure Kelp Gull. So I can see why the default is Kelp x Herring. However, the chance of this happening is very, very small. I will break my rule of never offering hybrid options that are unknown or unlikely….however essentially everything about this bird can be explained by a Lesser x Great Black-backed hybrid. I don’t know if that has ever occurred, but it may be equally or even less crazy than a Kelp x Herring in Michigan.

  So although the Mich bird is likely unidentifiable. As a hypothesis the Lesser x Great hybrid seems equally valid as Kelp x Herring. Since there are a bunch of Herring x GBBG hybrids out there one can study, this bird does seem off from that. Too dark as you say, and too little white on primaries. I would imagine an F2 bird would be darker like this, but would also show more white on primaries. So that option does not explain the look of this bird]

 

We had Thayer's Gulls at both 3 Oaks and New Buff.

I didn't get particularly close, here the Thayer's is landing on the left side, dark-eyed, fairly heavily hooded; the Venetian blind primaries come through so-so.

Changing the mantle

After entirely too many posts (don't think it'll stop me in the future) on Gull-nasty, the dark-mantled Chandeleur type gull (Kelp x Herring), I have a different dark-mantled hybrid for your viewing pleasure.

This bird was off New Buffalo.  When I first picked it up, seeing a nearly entirely white headed gull with a noticeably darker mantle than the average Herring Gull, but lighter than a typical graelsii Lesser Black-backed I had hopes for a Vega or Yellow-legged Gull.  As we got closer though the mantle seemed a bit dark for either and the bird was globe-headed with a heavy bill even for a Herring Gull.  You can get a sense of the heft of the bill and the jaw compared to the HERG in the foreground:

A flight shot ...

The one pic of GBBG x HERG in Howell and Dunn has a slightly larger mirror on P9, but I'm sure this is still within the range of variation.  It shares the subterminal white spot "pearl" on P7.

It made a couple close passes at our bread.  I kept shooting to try to get the orbital color...

It's orange or red-orange, both black-backs have red orbitals per Sibley, HERG has yellow-orange.

So, to summarize the intermediate characters on this bird, body size and bill larger and heavier than HERG arguing strongly for GBBG, mantle intermediate between HERG and a black-back, orbital intermediate, the feet are pink pretty close to a typical HERG and not like the much paler pink feet of a GBBG.  The intensely pink feet, large size, and minimal head markings are pretty strong arguments against LBBG as the black-backed parent.

While it's always hard to compare shades of gray in a photo, I think that these pics are pretty representative of the relative shades, here's a Lesser Black-back from the same flock at virtually the same time:

Lesser seems to moult later than do the other gulls, this one is a bit asymmetric with an old P10 on one side and a fresh P10 still growing in on the other.

Happy 10th, Gull-nasty

The dark-mantled pseudo-kelp hybrid made its annual return to the Lake Michigan shoreline this morning.  It' been an adult since at least 2006 meaning it's at least 10 years old.



Nothing else has its honking bill, rattlesnake-like triangular head and long, long grey-green legs.

As usual it's molting its primaries. Here's the bird in 2011, 2010, 2009 and before.  Last year I emailed Steve Cardiff, one of the LSU researchers who studied the Chandeleur islands Herring-Kelp hybrids.  He said it wasn't one.

I actually have had a ton of good yearbirds in the 2 weeks or so  thanks to considerably expanded UTSJ counts.  A couple different Parasitic Jaegers, Long-tailed Jaeger, Eared Grebe, Whimbrel, Hudsonian Godwit, and Little Gull have all flown past, though most well past photo range.  This Little Gull came close, however it was on top of us before I picked it up and it quickly ducked into the Sun.

Tim immediately started chumming with bread but it never came back.  The closest we came was this young Bonapartes.

It actually has a Black-headed Gull like bit of color at the base of the bill.

For the first few hours today it was super calm.  Tim pointed out the spring peeper like noises in the background which were hundreds of Swainson's thrushes making their way inland high overhead.  As it was pretty calm birds weren't really falling out on the pier though their simple numbers were enough that there was a steady trickle of Palms down the pier.  We had double digit warbler species numbers in the park though the overwhelming majority were Palms.

A Sedge Wren popped out and then took refuge on the escape ladder on the pier's edge before flying off into the grass.

Tiscornia is really the only place I see these birds since they don't ever really seem to tee up for me on their breeding roadsides.

GBBG x GLGU and ???

We had a couple interesting gulls this morning at Tiscornia, starting with a presumed adult hybrid between Great black-back and Glaucous. It's not pictured in many books, but is in the Howell and Dunn Gulls book. Basically it's a GBBG but with a white trailing edge to the primaries. For whatever reason I don't have a great close pic of a flying adult GBBG (though 2 posts ago has a marginal one), but suffice it to say it shouldn't have a completely white trailing edge. Tim had this bird back in mid-November (and got vastly better shots then) as well as yesterday. It was the first time I'd seen it.

Also on the beach this morning was this bird.

The size, whitish primaries, and perhaps the bi-colored bill certainly indicate significant Glaucous heritage. I've never seen a Nelson's Gull (GLGU x HEGU) with this white of primaries, though admittedly that's what Sibley shows. (Howell and Dunn jive more with my experience, showing 8 photos of first year presumed GLGU x HEGU and none have white primaries, though one shot of a 2nd cycle does). The fine dark markings in the wing coverts on the perched bird are really reminiscent of a GBBG. The pic of first cycle GLGU x GBBG in Howell and Dunn, however, shows these to be much more extensive (though they make the caveat in most of their discussions of the hybrids that they can all be variable and run through the spectrum of adult appearances).

It flew by the end of the pier a couple times.

This was a very large gull which we thought might support GBBG x GLGU for this bird too, though Brandon Holden has a shot of a really big Nelson's as well. The blotchiness of the underparts is displayed by Glaucous (though usually not this diffusely) in 2nd cycle birds. Given that Nelson's (GLGU x HEGU) is more likely I wonder if this is actually a 2nd cycle Nelson's. It's really frustrating to not be able to solidly age it, but with GLGU starting with a bi-colored bill and skipping the dirty brown bill altogether it's hard to fall back on the bill. Perhaps Tim's shots will show the back a little better to see what feather ages might be there.

still alive

I swung by the New Buffalo area a couple days ago. While quickly scanning through the gulls in the howling wind I fairly quickly picked up the hybrid dark-mantled gull that's been kicked around as a Chandeleur Gull, Great Black-back x Herring, or who knows what.

We haven't seen it at Tiscornia this year and thought he might have joined Hughie. He hadn't.

There's always some semi-odd gulls in the New Buffalo flock (though with 300 Herring Gulls, simple probability says that 1% of them will be outliers). This first fall bird (no longer a juvie with first winter back plumage) is a lot more white-headed than the average first year HEGU.

If this bird was on the other side of Lake Michigan I bet a whole bunch of people would be desperately gripping for a Euro Herring Gull, especially if you compare it to a recently arrived juvenile Herring Gull in fresh dark plumage presumably from the high arctic.

From my extensive experience in chucking a gull book in the air and seeing what page it falls open to randomly for ID quality assurance purposes, Euro Herring Gull supposedly has a much whiter rump among other points.

This one looks pretty normal.

maybe it is a Chandeleur Gull

I've been pooh-poohing this bird for at least 4 years now as having any Kelp Gull genes, believing Greater Black-backed to be the dark-mantled parent. Yesterday (a year to the day that I last featured it in a Tiscornia blog), the bird re-appeared at Tiscornia so Tim and I walked down after a bit to get some shots. It flew back and forth a few times so these are my first decent spread wing shots.

The bird, as usual, is in wing moult, with P7-10 retained from last year, P6 growing out, and P1-5 fresh. I think no more than a couple of secondaries are moulted, and obviously it's missing some inner rectrices as well. Note that on the outer retained primaries, the white tips of the feathers are essentially worn off.

Having pulled back up the Dittman and Cardiff paper describing the Herring x Kelp gull pairings in Louisiana's offshore Chandeleur Islands, the wing pattern does turn out to be pretty good for Chandeleur gull. Here's their description feather-for-feather with my feelings on this bird:

P10: black with a large square white mirror - yes, though maybe I wouldn't describe this bird's mirror as large

P9,8: black outer web and somewhat paler inner web - yes

P7: black outer web extending nearly to the base - yes

P6: black outer web extending partially up the feather, with the inner web dark gray and with a black subterminal band with a white tip - all those features present but this bird has a white pearl/crescent proximal to the subterminal band in addition

P5: dark gray with a black subterminal spot/bar, with a proximal white crescent above on the inner web and a large white tip - yes almost exactly, though a tiny amount of white in the pearl/crescent area is on the outer web too

P4-1: dark gray with a large white tip - this bird also has a small black subterminal band on the outer web of P4 and P3
Our bird has a little more white where Slaty-back has its "string of pearls" with some extra white on P6 and P5 for their description of a classic F1 Chandeleur gull, but overall that's pretty close, and a little more black spotting in P3 and P4, though Herrings certainly can be somewhat variable in how many of those feathers have black spotting too.

The 2nd flight shot does show the grey/green/yellow leg color which I still say sometimes looks pinkish in the webs in some lighting though Tim says I'm crazy (or need new glasses). Or both.

One of my biggest concerns about this bird in the past is that it does seem a little bigger than most Herring gulls, though in some of my pics it seems like it's longer but maybe leaner too. Since Kelp Gulls are smaller than Herring's I thought that would be a bit of a deal breaker, but perhaps not. Dittman and Cardiff say that Chandeleur gulls look about the same size as Herring gulls which the pics perhaps suggest.

Here's another of Tim's pics showing the size comparison as well.

So I guess the bottom line is that perhaps I am coming around to think of this as a Chandeleur Gull.

Just in case flight shots of black and white wings are giving you headaches, these Snow Buntings that swirled around us yesterday as well may be a bit of a relief on the eyes.