Remember, DO NOT post your answers here, email them to me at featherbrain1@gmail.com
I don't think any of us had trouble narrowing this bird down to a gull, the large wings, large body, and short tail makes it easy to narrow it down. A tern species would have narrower wings with a thinner bill, plus there are no terns in the ABA area with a completely black head (Black Tern dose have a completely black head, but not a contrasting white body). The black head also helps us rule out many gulls, leaving us with 6 regularly occurring species of black-hooded gulls. We'll start out with Sabine's Gull, this can easily be ruled out by their amazing and very distinct wing patter, black primaries with white tips followed by the striking white secondaries. Definitely not this gull!
Next off we'll move to Little Gull -- other than the black hood, breeding plumage Little Gull has very little similarities to our quiz bird. Little Gull has no white eye-arcs like the quiz bird does, the underwings of Little Gull are dark, and the flight feathers are white-tipped from the very first primary through the last secondary.
Breeding Bonaparte's Gull can be separated easily having a thinner bill than the quiz bird (the color of the bill is also black, but due to the lighting of the photo we can't make out the color of the quiz bird's bill), plus the wing pattern is wrong, instead of having the tips of it's wings dipped in black with a bit of white on the tips of the primaries, Bonaparte's Gull has the exact opposite pattern, white primaries with small black tips.
Breeding Black-headed Gull can be separated by the wing pattern, it has black primaries but the black extends almost to the base of the primaries unlike the quiz bird. Also unlike the quiz bird, there are two contrasting white with small black tips.
Laughing Gull is very similar to this bird, but once again the wing pattern separates it from the quiz bird. To put it very simply, Laughing Gull lacks the large white tips on some the primaries.
This leaves us with adult breeding Franklin's Gull photographed in North Dakota in June.
Tallies of incorrect answers:
Black-headed Gull - 2
Congratulations to:
tim.birdboy
valleygirl
Bird Man of Texas
Andy Lee
MojoWaxswinger
Nancy
TheGrine
Scoreboard: (remember if you don't want to be listed just let me know)
tim.birdboy - 24
Bird Man of Texas - 22
Valleygirl - 22
Raptor - 10
Andy Lee - 10
roundywaves - 5
MojoWaxswinger - 5 TheGrine - 5
featherbrain
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