George Ord published the description of his toothed-bill gull in 1815, calling it
a beautiful Gull… discovered on the Delaware below Philadelphia…. Length nineteen and a half inches, extent three feet ten inches; the upper mandible has four indentations or blunt teeth, the lower three; corners of the mouth and the eyelids bright vermilion; head, neck, tail and lower parts pure white; wings, back and scapulars blue ash. Weight nineteen ounces avoirdupois.
Mysterious, isn’t it?
Once again, it was George Lawrence, working up the gulls for Baird’s 1858 volume of the Railroad Surveys, who figured out what on earth the Philadelphian was talking about. As to that odd bill, Lawrence was satisfied that it was
a possible malformation, or probably an accidental toothing, caused by its being worn in some particular mode of feeding.
Otherwise, he assures his reader that Ord’s description “agrees precisely with the adult of” another gull, described as new in 1831, Larus zonorhynchus. Richardson notes that the chief distinction between his new bird and the common gull lies
in the size of the bill … being very much wider at the base, more rounded on the ridge, and stronger [in] every way than that of L. canus: it has a conspicuous salient angle beneath, and is of a dutch-orange colour, with a blackish ring near its tip.
Lawrence’s identification of Ord’s gull with Richardson’s bird meant, of course, that our ring-billed gull must bear the older name, delawarensis. And it does.
Not that it matters, but I think there’s something very fishy here. I see no reason that we should simply accept Lawrence’s synonymizing zonorhynchus — and he himself admits that, in spite of his own “strong opinion,” it is difficult “to establish certainly the identity of Mr. Ord’s species with” the one described by Richardson. A far better thing it would have been to simply declare delawarensis a name attached to nothing, and to give Richardson the credit for having produced an identifiable description of the bird.
How about it? Shall we all start calling this abundant and familiar bird the Richardson gull?
No, probably not.
