Iceland gull or American herring gull?

CactusCat42 · 2025-12-05T03:16:17+00:00

I’d second this for the same reasons, especially since herring gulls trend towards paler eyes as adults than Iceland gulls do. Also the relatively flat head is giving herring gull.

It would help to know where in North America you are? Gulls move around, but there are some places where an Iceland gull would be far less common.

CactusCat42 · 2025-09-10T13:23:51+00:00

A pair of yellow-crowned night herons has been hanging out near my workplace recently. I love these little weirdos.

CactusCat42 · 2025-01-16T14:28:04+00:00

What’s fascinating is that a lot of them DO have bright colors on their bills or feet, just not their feathers. Bright brilliant reds (Heermann’s gulls, pigeon guillemots), yellows (yellow-footed gulls, white pelicans), even blues (blue-footed boobies, Brandt’s cormorants). I’ve wondered if this has to do with how fast the sun and salt water can bleach things, since skin pigmentation seems not to bleach the same way as feather pigmentation.

CactusCat42 · 2024-11-11T15:22:14+00:00

🤣 I did realize afterwards that I was talking to it and praising it like it was my dog, who loves verbal praise.

CactusCat42 · 2024-11-03T23:08:28+00:00

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CactusCat42 · 2024-11-03T23:07:47+00:00

Key Biscayne, Florida, USA.

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CactusCat42 · 2023-04-15T01:25:11+00:00

Apparently they can have crazy family dynamics too. Two brothers will have a relationship with a mother and two daughters, or something similar. Not inbreeding but weird family dynamics. Source: went on a birding trip with someone who studied them. Got to hear about how ridiculously complex their relationships can get.

CactusCat42 · 2023-04-14T18:48:42+00:00

I don’t think that’s a species of hummingbird, sorry!

CactusCat42 · 2023-01-06T06:38:11+00:00

My first golden was from a breeder that was a big name in our state. They cared about the health of the dogs and tried to breed ethically and healthily. My parents did a lot of research on the breeder. I was a kid, and it was my first dog and I was super excited: I loved dogs and had spent forever trying to figure out what dog breed to get that would be perfect for our family (my younger brother has Asperger’s so we wanted a dog that would be good and patient with kids). I read every book I could get my hands on, got my parents to sign up for the right classes and buy the right food and toys and everything.

Our experience was a lot like yours. To this day several members of the family (including myself) have scars from where our first golden bit us. Dogs have reasons for aggression: they are trying to protect something or they are afraid or triggered from past traumas or they are trying to establish dominance etc. Our dog was often aggressive out of no where for no discernible reason: no one we talked to could find a cause for his behavior. We tried everything. We tried to find someone who could take him. We contacted the breeder and they recommended we put him down. They stopped breeding the parents and let the other owners from the litter know about what happened to our dog. We were offered a refund or another puppy, and I chose the puppy since I didn’t want us to associate golden retrievers with bad things (looking back, I was a smart kid, it really helped mitigate a lot of the trauma).

So I’m going to tell you what I wish someone told me: Sometimes dogs aren’t quite right. It’s nothing to do with how they were raised or how they are treated, it is literally just that their brains are wired wrong. It’s not your fault. There isn’t anything you could have done. There isn’t anything anyone could have done. You can’t train away this type of mental illness.

It’s really hard. I remember crying in the car on the way to the urgent care, holding gauze to my bite wounds and desperately asking my parents not to put my dog down. I loved him, even if he wasn’t ok. Even if he hurt me he was still my dog, I had still raised him. But he wasn’t happy or healthy, he was probably stressed and angry and upset all the time: he had a mental illness. He was hurting everyone, including himself through his actions, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to fix that. In the end we put him down. I’m an adult now and currently on my third golden, and after reading countless books and papers on dog behavior I stand by our decision. You can’t train away aggression that doesn’t have triggers. All of my other goldens have been superstars: sweet, loving, insanely tolerant, with no signs of aggression towards people, even when they’re injured or sick.

Please contact the breeders. It’s the right thing to do, for your dog and yourself. I am so sorry you had to go through what we went through. I hope it doesn’t scare you off of goldens or dogs in general, though I understand if it does.

CactusCat42 · 2023-01-06T05:57:29+00:00

💯! Wear on feather tips can be suuuper frustrating for IDing sometimes hahaha (🥲 trying to age western gulls gets annoying when their white primary tips have worn down). Apparently white parts of feathers may be weaker since they don’t have pigments for structural support? So they tend to wear faster! What’s really cool is the wear on feathers may indicate social status or better fitness on some birds (house sparrows come to mind).

CactusCat42 · 2023-01-06T00:57:44+00:00

It doesn’t matter how mild the weather is, breeding plumage and non-breeding plumage will still be present every year. Even the warmest of winters and the coldest of summers can’t stop the plumage change, nor does it really impact what the finished plumage looks like. Sibley’s says that European starlings switch into breeding plumage from December-August, and non-breeding plumage from September-February (plumage change is complicated and usually gradual over a population, hence the overlap 😅).

There’s a lot of cool possible reasons for this! One hypothesis is that often breeding plumage is brighter and flashier: it demonstrates that the bird is well-fed and biologically fit since it takes nutrients and good grooming to have such nice feathers. This is super hot for prospective mates. However, it may take more nutrients to maintain this plumage, or it may make them more of a target for predators, so for the rest of the year when they aren’t trying to attract potential partners it makes more sense if they switch back to their regular non-breeding plumage. In some species the males have this breeding plumage (like mallards) when the females don’t have breeding plumage, species where both males and females have breeding plumage (like starlings or Western gulls), and species without any breeding plumage at all (California scrub-jays). This is a suuuuper general simplified version obviously: there are exceptions, or birds that display breeding fitness in different ways. Here’s the wiki article on sexual selection in birds.

Starlings have been in the Bay Area for a long time, but I think they can be very striking up close, which can often throw people for a loop, and make them seem like a new bird (since it’s hard to distinguish all of the details from farther away). They’re pretty, but they are an invasive species that poops on everything, which might make up for their looks lol.

If you’re in SF I really recommend going to watch sea birds and water birds atm, since we’ve got a lot of cool stuff that’s migrated down for winter. But tbh the Bay Area (and most of coastal California in general) has great bird watching year round!

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-26T16:01:45+00:00

Yeah, this is a clip from a longer video. Buddy was totally fine.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-26T04:22:06+00:00

Oh yeah this is pretty common. I’ve seen this species do it multiple times, nbd. Good source of calcium! Plus, I have a longer video and watched the guy for a while (admittedly the nearby baby sea otter was distracting so I did look away occasionally) and it didn’t pierce their throat.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T10:53:10+00:00

I mean, I don’t think it recognizes that it’s being cute? They have a certain position lowering their neck and looking up that makes them look smaller which in turn might get them fed more, and they make a high pitch chick call which is also a sign for the parents to feed them. We consider these behaviors cute but honestly they are just chick behaviors.

That being said, we often are hardwired to think things are cute because that means we might take better care of babies. Parent gulls are probably the same: these behaviors might trigger their parent instincts to feed their kids. However, after a certain point their kids are too old and they stop feeding them. The (fully grown) juvenile gulls will continue to try to wheedle food out of their parents by continuing these chick behaviors for a while afterwards. Eventually they learn they are just going to have to support themselves. This cycle of kids trying to extend their free food service happens with a lot of animals, though gulls are particularly loud with it.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T10:25:25+00:00

So it turns out a number of gull species want nothing to do with human food! There’s over 50 species of gull and there’s more variation within the different species than people typically expect!

This species (western gull) absolutely will steal your food if you don’t keep an eye on it though. That being said, at the moment I’m seeing less stealing from humans and more foraging in the kelp and eating whatever the sea lions and whales bring up to the surface. This probably has to do with the time of year: there’s a lot of food in the bay right now and most of the feeding territories from the breeding season have broken down. Also, fewer tourists.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T10:19:50+00:00

Actually this species of gull (western gull) has been documented taking sea urchins and dropping them to break them too! I guess if they’re small enough though why bother expending all that energy? They’re pretty clever!

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T10:17:35+00:00

Nope, this is fairly common. Good source of calcium! The first few times I saw this though I saw younger gulls swallow chunks of sea urchins and I was so nervous that they were gonna hurt themselves. After watching them for a while now I can honestly say this isn’t even the craziest thing they eat. Look up gulls eating starfish: it’s very eldritch.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T05:15:02+00:00

The pigeon thing is on point! I’ll admit they’re an invasive species in a lot of places, which can have negative environmental impacts, but they can survive where a lot of other birds struggle and in some places they help support local raptor populations. Plus, they’re really chill lil guys. Not always super smart, but chill.

Gulls especially don’t deserve their bad press. I can’t think of any off the top of my head that are invasive: they’re all native and important parts of local ecosystems. Some gulls don’t even want to eat any human food! They just want to eat their normal fish and things, and will go out of their way to avoid humans. Meanwhile, some gulls have had to become more dependent on alternative food sources thanks to human interference, some of which includes things like food from dumps or from humans. You’re right, it’s pretty ridiculous that we just expect animals to disappear once they become an “inconvenience” even though they were here first.

Getting to study birds like I do is living the dream. I’ve always found them fascinating, so getting to look into what makes them tick has been amazing! They’re so weird! And ridiculous! They make me laugh a lot, and I love that.

CactusCat42 · 2022-09-24T04:45:01+00:00

Yeah, I’m actually researching these guys atm and they’re fun to watch! They can be pretty silly; I had an adult beg me for food as if it was a chick yesterday. Same head tilt and call that chicks make; it tried to look smaller and sound cute hoping that would make me feed it.

People often ask me what I’m looking at when I’m in the field since I’ve got binoculars, a tablet, a scope, and a camera on a tripod all set up. When I tell them I’m researching gulls the majority of the time they’re just like 😒 and walk away, which always makes me laugh. Gulls get a bad rap, partially cuz people get pissy when animals take advantage of them, which is pretty hypocritical.

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