Ring-billed gull

Voice

Fuller and harsher than Common Gull but higher and more nasal than Herring Gull. The long call is a series of sharp, crowing kee-ah notes that sags at the end; a short barking kek goes with squabbling over food. A lone wintering bird is often silent, but in a scrapping gull flock the nasal timbre carries.

Identification

A medium-sized gull, a size up from Common Gull and heavier in build, with a flatter crown and a distinctly stouter bill. The mantle is pale blue-grey, a shade lighter than Common Gull. Adults show a yellow bill with a clean black band set just short of the tip, a pale yellow iris with a red orbital ring, and yellow to yellow-green legs. The wing tip carries a good deal of black with small mirrors, usually one on the outermost primary and a white point on the next. In winter the head and neck are finely streaked brown, often gathered into a smudge behind the eye. Second-winter birds already show a grey mantle but keep a black tail band, brown coverts and a pale bill with a broad dark tip.

Confusion species

Common Gull is the whole problem, and it pays to run the features in a fixed order. Size and structure first: Ring-billed is bigger and bulkier, thicker-billed and flatter-headed, and looks heavy the moment it stands beside one. Then the bill band: on Ring-billed a sharply cut black ring that leaves the yellow clean on both sides, on Common Gull at most a diffuse green-grey shadow with soft edges, and on many adults nothing at all. Then the eye: pale yellow with a red orbital ring, which gives the bird a hard, staring expression, against the dark eye and gentle face of Common Gull. Then the legs: bright yellow to yellow-green, against the grey-green of Common Gull. Last the wing tip: Ring-billed shows more black and smaller mirrors, Common Gull two large mirrors that often merge into a single white block. Immatures are harder, and there the pale, cleanly dark-tipped bill and the greyer, less barred midwing panel do the work.

Habitat

In Europe almost always alongside people: town lakes and reservoirs, marinas and quays, promenades and coastal car parks, close-mown playing fields and the beach. On a rising tide the birds shift to the mud of the nearest estuary. In North America it nests colonially on islands in large lakes and rivers, and increasingly on flat factory roofs.

Range and movements

Breeds across Canada and the northern United States and winters from the southern states to Mexico. Ireland and the western half of Britain hold the lion's share of European records; the first for Britain was at Blackpill, Swansea, on 14 March 1973, and the species was later dropped from the British rarities list. Numbers have fallen sharply: Britain averaged around seventy-seven birds a year at the peak in the 1990s, sixteen a year through the 2010s and single figures in the early 2020s, a decline that tracks the North American breeding population. Elsewhere it is a genuine rarity, with the first Dutch record in 1986.

Where and when to look

In winter work the marina wall, the boating lake and the playing field where Common Gulls loaf, and look for one bird a size too large with an eye too pale. Do not stop at the bill band, because plenty of second-winter Common Gulls carry one. If a bird looks right, come back: Ring-billed Gulls settle, stay for weeks and often return to the same lake for years, and long-staying individuals at sites such as Nimmo's Pier in Galway have become fixtures.

Conservation status

Least Concern, with a world population put at over two million birds in 2018. Breeding numbers in North America are falling, and the European record total has followed them down. On the breeding grounds disturbance, botulism outbreaks and the closure of open landfill all play a part, and the same closures have thinned the winter feeding opportunities that once held birds on this side of the Atlantic.