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Glaucous x Herring Gull Hybrid - NE Kansas

Chao Wu
Apr 14, 2016
2 min read

It appears eBird has accepted my sighting of a Herring x Glaucous Gull hybrid I reported back on the fifth of March of this year. This was back at the beginning of spring break, when I flew back to Topeka from Boston. Ironically, or perhaps not, we drove to Perry Lake, mostly to try my luck with some of the waterfowl in the area (and perhaps an eagle or two). There were a few reports of a Glaucous Gull in the region from two or three weeks prior, and the Glaucous is definitely a species on my list.

When I first spotted this specimen, I thought it was the Glaucous. The individual was fairly white in coloration and proportionately, though not necessarily statistically significantly, larger than the Herring Gulls next to it. It was exceptionally far away and I only had my Panasonic DMZ-FZ70 with me at the time, which meant the large majority of images where highly cropped.

Eventually, the sun dipped a bit lower in the horizon and I realized the bird wasn’t as pure white as a Glaucous Gull without solar saturation. In accordance, the wing-tips weren’t the characteristic pure-white of a Glaucous either. However, the general plumage wasn’t dark enough to be Herring either. So, after a bit of questioning, I decided to post the image to the North American Gulls group, which confirmed my suspicions that it was a possible Herring x Glaucous hybrid, which is sometimes known as the Nelson’s Gull.

Apparently, the “Nelson’s Gull” was described as a full species by H.W. Henshaw in The Auk Vol. 001 No.03 in 1884. Named after Alaskan ornithologist E.W. Nelson, it was later discovered that the “species” was a hybrid between a Glaucous and Herring.

I’m not completely sure about this hybrid’s presence in Kansas, though I do know it is one of the more common hybrids in the Great Lakes regions.

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