Bulgaria 2007: Gulls with Yellow Legs

Sometimes I just worry too much.

Even in the middle of June, Bulgaria is a great place for larids. From the very moment we got off the plane in Sofia, large white-headed gulls with bright yellow tarsi were an everyday sight, in cities and countryside alike. Yellow-legged Gull, of course. But, ahem, what is that, exactly?

The ticklist we were sent in advance of the trip listed both Yellow-legged Gull Larus michaelis [sic] and Caspian Gull Larus cachinnans. While several authoritative checklists still consider the two conspecific, as Yellow-legged Gull Larus cachinnans (sensu lato), the new Clements recognizes both (but it spells the epithet of the narrowly construed Yellow-legged Gull correctly, as michahellis).

Gerard, the trip’s id and taxonomy lycurgus, assured me that we could safely identify all such birds as michahellis until we found a “funny one” on the Black Sea, which sadly we never did. And now, as I work up my trip notes, I’m stuck in an ontological quandary only a birder could appreciate: but what an opportunity to try out the new Howell and Dunn.

Unfortunately, Caspian Gull is there deemed “an unlikely candidate for vagrancy to N. America” and so goes untreated. And so I have to open Olsen and Larsson, which is full of information but a real trudge to read. And at that point, I surrender. Pale eye, bright legs, and red spot bleeding onto the upper mandible make the identification of the adults I photographed as michahellis plausible enough. And this messy third-cycle bird, too.