Peru: Larids in the Afternoon

Already it was my last day in Peru. After a good night’s sleep and my second hot shower in ten hours–I would have had a third had I been able to stay up a bit later–I popped out of our Cusco hotel (the significantly named Bujos) and into a taxi, which had me to the airport in ten minutes. Less than two hours later, I was in Lima, where Gunnar and I had an excellent fish lunch in Miraflores. And then it was off to do some coastal birding.

I’d concentrated my preparations (meager as they were) on jungle birds, so it came as a happy shock to find myself sorting through gulls and shorebirds right on the Lima waterfront. The numbers of Andean Gulls were impressive and surprising, well upwards of a hundred loafing on the mud. A quick scan turned up three Franklin’s Gulls, too, first of the fall and the first I’d ever seen on that species’ distant wintering grounds.

But there were larids entirely new to me, too, including great hulking Kelp Gulls (the big black-backed birds in the lower right corner above).

The adults are comfortingly distinctive, but I’m afraid I’d overlook birds in other plumages as pale Western Gulls (or, in the East, as poorly marked Greater Black-backed Gulls).

The other birds in the photo above are Belcher’s Gulls, also known as Band-tailed Gull when considered conspecific with Olrog’s (you were dying to know, weren’t you?). Adults are natty black-backed gulls with neat black tail-bands and brightly marked bills, but it’s those first-cycle birds that really catch the eye and win the heart.

With those beautiful gray hoods and frosty bodies, they reminded me again and again of some kind of exotic southern petrel. Just as striking was the difference in perceived structure between the young birds and the adults;  I still haven’t figured out whether it is optical illusion or physical reality (the difference?), but the adults were consistently sleeker and flatter backed to my eye, recalling Lesser Black-backed Gull rather than the Glaucous Gull bulk of the kids.

The most abundant gull of our beach afternoon was the simply named and demurely feathered Gray Gull, a desert-nesting species that winters up and down the Peruvian coast.

Both adults and immatures well deserve their scientific epithet modestus; adults are solid gray with a broad white secondary skirt, immatures snouty, mud-colored creatures reminding me of a bland Laughing Gull.

If Gray Gulls may be a bit on the utilitarian side, Gray-hooded Gulls are all ghostly grace and light.

At all ages, they look much like any other of the small “tern-like” gulls, and it might be easy to pass a young bird like this one off as just a Black-headed.

But there’s no mistaking the pearly-headed beauty of this adult, with its dove-gray head and coral bill. Now to find one in the ABA Area….