Who’s Laughing Now?

Tucson is full of bearded birder Ricks, and one of them (he is fond of calling himself “the right Rick, not Rick Wright”) found a Laughing Gull at Willcox the other day. Alison and I ran over there this afternoon to see it: a fine bird, if a little ratty, and a new one for my Arizona list.

The English and scientific names of certain gulls make up a strange matrix of equivalences and contradictions. Our Willcox vagrant belongs to a species Linnaeus named atricilla, “black-tailed,” obviously relying on a non-adult specimen of the bird Catesby had already called Laughing Gull. Sixty years later, Vieillot described the Black-tailed Gull, Larus crassirostris (”thick-billed”). Eight years after describing the Laughing Gull, Linnaeus published his description of the abundant European species we know in English as Black-headed Gull; he gave it the epithet ridibundus, “laughing,” a translation of the bird’s common name in a number of other languages. And in 1820, Temminck named the Mediterranean Gull melanocephalus,”black-headed.” To top it all off, Pallas named the bird we know as Yellow-legged Gull cachinnans, another word for–get this–”laughing.”

Got all that? As if gulls weren’t hard enough already….