Friday, June 23, 2006

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.

Glaucous-winged Gull

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!

Glaucous-winged Gull

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.

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