American Herring Gull

I went down to Cape May on Saturday for a full day of class on Gull Identification. We spent most of the day focusing our attention on the American Herring Gull. We must have looked at close to 1000 gulls in the field and then viewed more on slides in the class room.  Herring Gull Identification? How hard can it be to identify the most common gull on the Jersey Shore? The answer is it depends! Adult Herring Gulls look nearly identical in either their Basic (non-breeding or fall) Plumage or in their Alternate (Breeding or Spring) Plumage and just about anyone can recognize an adult.  The problem is that it takes a Herring Gull four years to become an adult and each immature year class (called cycles) also has a different appearance in their Basic and Alternate plumages. A first cycle Herring Gull looks very different from an adult. Suddenly we now are up to eight different plumages for the species (and we didn't even address subspecies variation). Then to make matters even worse, they don't molt and grow in their new feathers over night. So a molting a gull will have an intermediate appearance that can be anywhere in between its Basic and Alternate plumages! Talk about a challenge! Now for the good news, most species of gull go through a similar sequence of molts from juvenile to adult. So knowing what a Herring Gull looks like at all ages and molts becomes essential when you are scanning a large flock of gulls trying to locate one rare gull. Turns out Gull Identification is very advance birding.

                               Immature - First Cycle 



             










                             
                    Adult - Basic Plumage 

                 

                           Adult - Alternate Plumage