With winter vacation more than half over (already?!?) and a bunch of work I still need to do, I took a chance to try and find the sporadically reported Mew Gull in Brooklyn today. Despite the fact that the bird hadn’t been seen since the previous evening (and seemed to only show up for short periods of time), Ryan and I decided to go. We were also planning on going after the Summer Tanager wintering on Staten Island, but, leaving at 1:30, we knew it was going to be a tight squeeze. After over an hour in transit, we arrived at the specified parking lot close to 3:00. There were some birders present along the promenade, most notably Shai Mitra, who remembered me from the Montauk Trip last month. Unfortunately, not one of them looked too excited, and we interpreted that as no luck with the gull (one birder passed us, saying he was leaving after looking for two hours). We made ourselves busy scanning nearby groups of Ring-billed Gulls, with which our target bird tended to congregate. All the bills had rings on them (the Mew Gull has a smaller bill that lacks a prominent black ring).
A few of the several hundred Ring-billed Gulls we had to sift through.
After talking with some of the other birders for a while, — including one who had come from Buffalo to see the bird! — the young birder party (which had grown to three with the unexpected arrival of Brendan) decided to walk further northwest along the walkway in the hopes of coming across the gull. There was a large group of ‘em down by the pedestrian bridge…
At a leisurely pace we sauntered on down, giving a passing glance to each gull that flew or drifted by. The clock was ticking and I knew Ryan wanted to get to Staten Island. We almost left.
“Are you looking for the Mew Gull?”
It was a man with a spotting scope, coming from the direction we were headed. Interesting.
“Yeah,” I replied, ready to follow with a “…but no one’s seen it.”
“It’s down by the pedestrian bridge…”
I did a double-take. Oh, awesome! He said something about a rock and greenish-yellow legs. But I wasn’t really paying attention. We started walking down the promenade at quicker pace. After a hundred yards or so I said, “Let’s just jog…”
So we started running, one hand on our binoculars, the other on our scopes, just feet from a parkway with tons of slow-moving cars.
Finally we got to the big group of gulls. Brendan, who was first, confirmed the Mew Gull was there. The non-young birders behind us took a bit longer to arrive, but everyone saw it eventually. I felt sorry for the guy who had left as we arrived…
The Mew Gull!
That is, until we got too close to the group of Ring-bills. They took off and flew all the way BACK to where we had started! Well, who says birding isn’t exercise? We all started back for the lot (at a slightly slower pace), and pretty soon someone spotted it just offshore (does it count as a shore if it’s a concrete walkway?). We all had even better looks, and Shai pointed out the prominent white tertial crescents, another way to separate the bird from ring-bills (the easiest way being its yellowish unmarked bill). Good thing we hadn’t decided to leave for Staten Island! With the sun about to slip below the horizon, Ryan and I called off the tanager effort, but Mew Gull is definitely worth the trade-off…
