I haven’t forgotten or forgiven…. :-)
Jeff
On Jan 25, 2018, at 12:56 PM, Shawneen Finnegan <shawneenfinnegan@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
You bring up fond memories of the Pellet Plant. Between its loss and that of
Westmoreland Park finding gulls to pour through near Portland isn’t as
convenient as it once was. Paul Lehman and I found that first Slaty-backed
Gull while helping on the Christmas Bird Count. We were visiting my family
over the Christmas holidays. We were living in Cape May, NJ, at the time and
had travelled extensively to Alaska while working for WINGS seeing many
Slaty-backed in Nome and at out on Gambell. We knew what it was immediately.
It was indeed a shock to Jeff Gilligan and Owen Schmidt who thought they had
found it first. We spotted it about 45 minutes before they did. We were
watching them from across the field when they drove up and independently
located it. It was before cell phones and we had tried to find them before
giving up and returning to the pellet plant.
As for your first bird it is certainly not a Great Black-backed which are far
bigger than Herring Gulls and other big four-year gulls. GBBGs are massive
beasts, quite white headed, and spangle-backed in their first few years. They
truly are the largest of all gulls.
I would agree with Phil that your bird looks like a second-cycle
Slaty-backed. I don’t know when your photos were taken that you originally
posted but from the OBRC list of accepted records there were up to six birds
seen that winter at the pellet plant:
(http://www.orbirds.org/acceptedthroughapril2014.6.pdf ;
<http://www.orbirds.org/acceptedthroughapril2014.6.pdf>)
Slaty-backed Gull Larus schistisagus
048-92-02 Sauvie Island, Multnomah Co., up to six birds 27 December 1992-20
March 1993 (SF, PL, HH, BT, SMl; photos by HN, TFu, DVB, OS).
Shawneen Finnegan
Beaverton
On Jan 25, 2018, at 7:43 AM, Robert O'Brien <baro@xxxxxxx
<mailto:baro@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
SBGU01-09.jpg
The first episode in the saga of the 1999 Pellet Plant was (by my assertion)
the ‘best bird’. Or course, whether this is ‘fake news’ remains to be seen.
This 2nd installment is perhaps the ‘best PP photo’. It portrays the
flavour of this great birding resource of yesteryear. The Great
Black-backed Gull of the 1st installment has as ID competitors other
dark-mantled gulls: Western Gull [southern (dark) & northern (less dark)
races], Lesser Black-backed, Slaty-backed, and a world full of others less
likely here (Yellow-footed, Kelp….). These 9 photos are of the same gull,
exulting in the fantastic habitat it found so far away from home. In some
(especially older) references, Slaty-backed is said to be a massive gull.
Certainly not this one that had, in 1999, quite a few companions, which will
follow. I’ll post my 'ideas' about this bird in a day or two. Comments
encouraged.
As to the ‘Great Black-backed Gull’ (GBBG) of installment 1. The jury is
certainly still out, with Slaty-backed being a strong contender. I’m pretty
much reliving Jan 1999 here in a chain-of-consciousness mode and will
revisit it eventually.
As is well known, mantle color is important in gulls but it subject to a
wide array of effects: camera settings, intensity and angle of the sun,
post-processing (these are scanned slides from 1999), etc. One approach is
to compare colors, darkness with nearby gulls of familiar species.
Bob OBrien
PS If you get OBOL in digest mode which may lack photos, & you are
actually reading this arcane stuff, and want to see them, the photos are
available here:
https://www.freelists.org/archive/obol ;
<https://www.freelists.org/archive/obol>
Search the month’s list for 'armchair' ; the image is at the end of that
post and needs to be clicked on, at least on my system.
<SBGU01-09.jpg>
