Glaucous-winged Gulls

For some reason, gulls were lower on my list of birds to track down. Maybe I figured I was bound to bump into several hundred along the way since we were next to the water. I do know I paid some rapt attention when they were around.

Half way through the trip I was starting to squint at gull hard to try and make one a Mew Gull, to no avail. The only unexpected gull was a single California Gull. Most were Western and Glaucous-winged with some hybrid of the two thrown in for good measure.

I think my favorites turned out to be the Glaucous-winged. This one was in part of a flock along Alki Beach Park on the Puget Sound across from Seattle.



There were a few Westerns there, too. I need to go back through my pictures to actually find them.

One of my favorite shots of a gull was from near the end of my Dungeness hike. I see a big pattern here. Dungeness enters into almost every post somehow!



Since there was a nice steady breeze after the storm passed through, the few gulls I saw would flap into the wind and often hung in the air for a while before moving on into the wind or wheeled back to rest up the beach.

More information on Alki Beach can be found here.