counting coots

This gull is one of three things. It is either a Herring Gull with yellow legs and a dark mantle, or it is a Lesser Black Back with a pale mantle, or it is a Yellow Legged Gull. The mantle is darker in the photos than it appeared in reality.

It was flying around briefly and showed lots of black on the primary tips, and hardly any white in the mirror thingies. It, of course, landed on the far bank and just wandered about a little bit. Near enough to an LBB and a Herring Gull to ascertain the differences in colour. The yellow legs were mighty prominent at rest.

As I was trying different techniques of digimonocularisation it decided to take to flight with a Lesser Black Back (interesting!) and then came straight for me. To say that I was unprepared for this is a mild understatement, it takes about 5 seconds for it to cross the river, so all I had time to do was swear (of course) whack off the macro button on the camera and let rip. Except that when it had finished a quick loop and flew off it transpired that the macro button had not been turned off. So the pictures are less than useful. Nice clouds though.

A gull doing more dodgy

So there you have it, dodgy gull number 1. Probably just a washed out Lesser Black Back.

This was an adult. Just wait until I get on to the juvenile winterers. Yummy.