[cobirds] Re: Teller Gulls

I stopped by North Teller #5 this morning to practice gull observing before their food source freezes for a couple of days.

Christian Nunes reported no gulls around 7:45 AM.  There were a couple dozen there when I arrived an hour later.  When I left at 11:00 AM, there were over 150 gulls there.

All the gull arrivals I noticed were from the east.  (Well, at least the last quarter mile of their flights came from the east.)  The few departures I saw were also toward the east.  Arrivals were an ongoing slow trickle, 1 or 2 at a time.  The Glaucous-Winged x Herring arrived relatively early and stayed.  A Lesser Black-Backed arrived late.  There were also the usual few Thayer's gulls.  Ring-Billed gulls outnumbered Herring Gulls only slightly.  I did NOT see any Iceland-ish gulls this morning.

A Prairie Falcon made a brief appearance on the northwest side of the "lake", and the trees on the north side had two subspecies of White-Breasted Nuthatch -- one Eastern and one Interior West.

David Dowell

Longmont, CO

On Sunday, January 27, 2013 9:56:16 PM UTC-7, Steven Mlodinow wrote:

Greetings All

This is such an amazing and baffling combination of stuff. First of all, Glenn's GW x Herring Gull looks spiffy for that combo, yet looks to be a different bird than that photographed by David Dowell a couple days ago. Furthermore, the Thiceland seems to be just that. The apparent secondary bar and dark tail band (relatively speaking) seem wrong for Iceland, though the wingtips look spot-on for Iceland. 

I had a bird much like Glenn's Thiceland a week ago. Perched, it looked identical, but in flight the primaries were definitely darker. 

This eve, Mark Peterson, Tony Leukering and I walked into the Valmont complex from 75th. Where the heck are all of the Teller birds? We had fewer than 1000 gulls total, more like 750. Only 2 Lesser BB Gulls. We may have had the Thiceland- there was certainly a bird that looked much like it while perched and we never saw it in flight. However, no GBB Gull either. And we had a spiffy pale northern type GW GULL there. 

So, some of the Teller birds are clearly roosting at Valmont. Surprisingly, some appear not to be. And there appear to be gulls going to Valmont that aren't visiting Teller (which is not that surprising, even on a Sunday, when dumps inactive)

Good Birding

Steven Mlodinow

Longmont 

Sent from my iPhone

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