A Prairie Dove in Vancouver

For the entire first half dozen years of my birding life, Franklin’s Gull was the larid I’d seen most of: sure, Ring-billed Gulls were common enough at the right season in eastern Nebraska, but the dribs and drabs of other gulls we saw paled against the autumn flights of Franklin’s, with tens of thousands of birds passing in an afternoon.

I left the Midwest in 1983 (!), and haven’t seen all that many of the species since: the occasional migrant in Arizona, arriving winterers in Peru last month, a few breeding birds on my infrequent visits to the prairies and intermountain marshes. And so this morning I leapt at the chance to look for one reported from Steveston, just south of Vancouver.

The parking lot of the fish restaurant where, appropriately, the bird was first reported was empty. But the rain puddles on the oceanside park had a few birds on them: Snow Geese, Rock Pigeons, Brewer’s Blackbirds, and Glaucous-winged, Mew, and Ring-billed Gulls. And among them all a lovely little first-cycle Franklin’s Gull.

Unfortunately, as everywhere on British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, scofflaw dog walkers were setting their animals on the flock, so the birds were up and down, down and up several times during the half hour I watched them. At least that meant good views of the Franklin’s Gull in flight–though I would gladly have forgone them had it meant the bird’s getting a bit more peace.

I was surprised in the field to see that the central tail feathers were white: has this bird already molted that pair?