Today I spent a few hours searching for interesting gulls near the landfill at Tullytown. Lesser Black-backed Gulls were pretty easy to come by and I also saw a first-winter Iceland and a first-winter Glaucous Gull.
I then came across an interesting gull. It piqued my interest due to the dark area around the eyes, coloration of the bill and what I thought was a longer primary extension.
In the end, the pink legs and light colored iris point to this just being a well marked American Herring Gull. It’s always neat to see the variation that Herring Gulls are capable of. This bird is likely either a 3rd cycle gull or a 4th cycle gull, due to several darker tertials and the darker bill color.
Here are two shots I took when I was in Denver for Thanksgiving. The lighting was terrible.
Here are a couple shots of the Ash-throated Flycatcher in Lebanon Co. Behavior was very interesting, it foraged very low in the brush and grasses, often dropping down to catch something.
Below is the shot that can really clinch the id. The tail pattern on Ash-throated Flycatchers has a dark outer edge at the bottom of the outer tail feathers.
Below are some shots I had taken of the similar Great Crested Flycatcher.
And so we learned with a recent saw-whet that we attempted to track. She was released from the banding station at around 10pm and we tracked her for several hours but by 3 am she was gone, presumably having flown to the south out of range of our equipment.
This is a picture of Feist, another owl that left without giving us much time to track it. We were able to get one days roost data before the weekend, and when we came back, she was gone.
- Feist (nscnaowls.blogspot.com)
- Was it something we said? (nscnaowls.blogspot.com)
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