Trust Me Bird Watchers, There Is No Such Thing As A Seagull

I’ve done it. You’ve done it. Many people have done it, too, in fact.

If truth be told, we’ve all done it at one point or another on our journey as bird watchers, haven’t we?

Sure we have so let’s be open and honest here, every bird watcher has, at least once and probably more early on, referred to a gull as, well, let’s just come out and say it, a dreaded seagull.

Alright, maybe not every bird watcher but it’s a very common mistake a lot of us make because that is what society has ingrained into our minds over many years.

I’m not sure when or where the term seagull actually came from but I do know I grew up thinking gulls were just gulls and as such, they were all called seagulls.

Back in the day as a kid just starting out with bird watching I will admit, gulls just didn’t do it for me with regards to birds that grabbed and held my attention.

I mean here in Utah as a boy growing up with an interest in birds, gulls were a dime a dozen, and a few of them were found scavenging in fast-food parking lots and in landfills looking for a quick and easy meal.

Decades ago as a teenager, I remember going to the landfill with my dad to help unload some trash and I would watch gulls all over the facility calling at one another and fighting for what little food they could find.

And from all of that, like many people do, I never took gulls seriously and thought of them all as just pesky seagulls.

So naturally, because of where a few gulls have been found scraping up a meal or two just to survive, the whole gull family has been unfairly burdened with a bad wrap for a very long time by society as a whole, and it is quite unwarranted and just dead wrong.

The more time I spend watching and photographing gulls the more I realize they are quite interesting birds, to say the least, one that doesn’t deserve to be lumped into a general category mislabeled as seagulls.

As I pay more attention to gulls, I am finding out there are actually quite a few gull species in nature, with many of them coming here to Utah at some point or another during the year.

Personally, I am not as well versed regarding gulls as I am, or should be if truth be told, with other birds but I am trying to learn how to identify them better and more fully understand their behaviors and life cycles.

And if I was to give a full confession here, not being able to identify the many types of gulls that are out there is the biggest reason why gulls have still to this day taken a back seat to other birds for me for many years now.

But I am trying to change that with a lot more effort trying to identify gulls as I come across them on my travels.

After doing a little research on eBird and another Utah-based birding website, I have come up with a list of 25 gulls that have been spotted in Utah at one point or another.

Some of the gulls on the list are pretty common and others are quite rare, maybe even to the point of having only 1 or 2 occurrences ever in Utah.

I’m not sure of the actual breakdown but some of the gulls on the list are year-round residents in Utah and others are migratory, coming to or even just migrating through Utah for a short while to either breed or on their way further north or south for the season.

It’s not an official birding list of gulls in Utah by any means but rather just what I have been able to glean from eBird and other bird watching websites so just take it as it is offered, an informal list of what other birders have reported here in Utah which includes the ring-billed gull, California gull, herring gull, Iceland gull, lesser black-backed gull, glaucous-winged gull, Bonaparte’s gull, short-billed gull, little gull, sabine’s gull, franklin’s gull, laughing gull, western gull, great black-backed gull, white-winged gull, Slaty-backed gull, heermann’s gull, yellow-footed gull, ring-billed gull, glaucous gull, short-billed gull, little gull, Thayer’s gull, mew gull, and black-legged kittiwake.

So you see, there are a lot of gulls out there that are unfairly being lumped into one category when we use the generic term seagull instead of taking the time to learn about gulls as a family of birds.

As an added note here, I do want to mention a free class coming up regarding gull identification being held at the Eccles Wildlife Education Center at Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area.

11th annual Gullstravaganza Clinic and Field Trip. Saturday, February 19, 2022 at 12:30-4:30 pm.

The event will consist of a gull identification class and a nearby field trip on Farmington Bay starting at goose egg island and traveling the center dike to the end parking lot, stopping whenever necessary to look at the variety of gulls on Farmington Bay.

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