Kelp Gull in Southern Maryland

UPDATE (November 2004): This bird has been accepted as a Kelp Gull by the Maryland bird records committee. A new photo of it, by Matt Orsie, is posted below (N). Thanks Matt.

On 19 February 1999 I visited the now famous adult Kelp Gull on the Patuxent River in southern Maryland. I would like to thank the discoverers and rediscoverers for finding this stunning bird.

It was a very bright sunny day, and some of my photos ended up a bit underexposed. Also, they didn't scan as well as I would like. In life the legs were a bright yellow-green. The mantle was the same shade as Great Black-backed.

When I was there, there was discussion about several features of the bird being not quite right for Kelp Gull, especially the iris color (too pale), the bill (not quite massive enough), and the legs (too brightly colored). However, Harry Armistead sent me the following quote from Robert Cushman Murphy, "Oceanic Birds of South America (Macmillan, 1936):"

vol. 2, pp. 1057-1071. p. 1058: ..."the scapulars and all of the secondaries with broad white tips, which together form a conspicuous alar bar; primaries black, with white apical spots, the outermost with a rather small subapical mirror of variable size and shape; a light tongue, indicated from the fourth from the outermost primary, becoming more pronounced along the series inward." "Iris straw yellow or gray; eyelid carmine; bill amber, the tip of the lower mandible carmine; legs and feet greenish yellow." p. 1060: "These birds, considering the great series of adults as a whole, show an individual range in the color and form of the bill beyond anything that I can correlate with locality, age, or the well-marked differences of size between the sexes." "...many birds show...an extremely pronounced gonydeal angle, which results in a bill form approaching that of the Dolphin Gull...or even of "Gabianus pacificus" of the Australian region...I find that in several birds from Peru and South Georgia the feature is strongly marked, and yet is not shared by other examples taken at the same places and dates." p. 1061: "It is possible that a true geographic variation may be shown by the color of the iris in Kelp Gulls, In the field I have recorded ..."stone-gray" ... some of Beck's labels bear the notation "whitish" ... a number of Antarctic specimens, the iris is recorded as "light yellow".

I don't think that the bird is a Lesser of the race intermedius, L. fuscus intermedius. It is too big, the head and bill are too massive, the wings are too broad, the white trailing edge of the wing is too large, the primaries do not project enough, and the primary pattern is wrong.

I think that my photos give an accurate impression of the mantle color. For comparison, David H. Strother has provided a photo that he took with a digital camera at 2:30PM, February 21. It is a bit overexposed. The mantle looks too pale, but the jizz is communicated very well.

Also, Patty Craig has provided a photo (a print) that she took on January 31 with Kodak 100 Gold film.

A	B	C
D, with Herring Gull.	E	F
G	H	I, closeup of C
J, left wing. The white tip of P10 is not visible.	K, right wing	L, Photo taken by David Strother with a digital camera, a bit overexposed.
M, Photo (print) taken by Patty Craig.	N, Photo digiscoped by Matt Orsie, 27 Nov 2004.