No Such Thing as a Seagull

I’ll have to admit that until I seriously took up bird watching a few (several??) years ago I had a rather low opinion of â€?”seagulls.” Raised in Seattle, I tended to identify gulls with garbage cans or garbage dumps. I even thought there was a single gull species, â€?”seagulls.”

It didn’t take long before I learned not to say â€?”seagulls” around veteran birders who knew just how meaningless that term was. Nor did it take long to learn that several varieties of gulls never see the â€?”sea.” One birder loved to ask if I would call a gull that lived in the bay a â€?”Bagul.”

I also began to realize I was not seeing a single variety of gull every time I saw them. I was a little surprised to read on the internet that there are 17 different varieties of gulls in the United States alone, and 55 different varieties worldwide. I know I’ve seen at least 7 different varieties in the Puget Sound area in the last five or six years.

The Ring-Billed Gull, for instance,

is a medium-sized gull with a distinctive ring around its beak.

The Bonaparte Gull

is a rather beautiful, petite gull, much smaller than the Glaucous-Winged Gull that are common in the Puget Sound.