{"id":9365,"date":"2014-10-27T02:47:32","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T09:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=9365"},"modified":"2021-01-02T10:21:48","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T15:21:48","slug":"what-is-a-toothed-bill-gull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/27\/what-is-a-toothed-bill-gull\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is a Toothed-bill Gull?"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Ord published the description<\/a> of his toothed-bill gull<\/strong> in 1815, calling it<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mysterious, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Once again, it was George Lawrence, working up the gulls for Baird’s 1858 volume<\/a> 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<\/p>\n

a possible malformation, or probably an accidental toothing, caused by its being worn in some particular mode of feeding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Otherwise, he assures his reader that Ord’s description “agrees precisely with the adult of” another gull, described as new\u00a0in 1831,\u00a0Larus zonorhynchus<\/em><\/a>. Richardson notes that the chief distinction between his new bird and the\u00a0common gull<\/strong> lies<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Glaucous-winged<\/a><\/p>\n

Lawrence’s identification of Ord’s gull with Richardson’s bird meant, of course, that our ring-billed gull<\/strong> must bear\u00a0the older name,\u00a0delawarensis.\u00a0<\/em>And it does.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0zonorhynchus<\/em> — 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\u00a0delawarensis\u00a0<\/em>a name attached to nothing, and to give Richardson the credit for having produced an identifiable description of the bird.<\/p>\n

How about it? Shall we all start calling this abundant and familiar bird the Richardson gull<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

No, probably not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What Is a Toothed-bill Gull?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9365"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9365"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11822,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9365\/revisions\/11822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}