Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 18:11:03 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: "George M. Jett" Subject: Iceland Gull in Charles County Comments: To: SMAS Comments: cc: Miliff@aol.com, Jim Stasz , Robert Ringler MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Folks Today Gwen Brewer and I visited the Charles County landfill to recycle some stuff and drop off our trash. There was a nice sized flock of about 5000 gulls actively feeding. We had taken only binoculars since we had other errands to do. About 11:30 AM we spotted a white-winged gull feeding in the mix, which we identified as a first winter Iceland Gull. After about 20 minutes, I decided to race home to get my camera. I think this bird may represent the first record of this species for Charles County. The landfill is on Billingsley Rd. off of Rte. 5 (DeLorme p. 37, C-5). It is open 7am-4pm weekdays (open on Sat., too, but I am not sure of the hours). It may not receive garbage every day of the week. We looked for the gulls from the recycle center area, where you can look across to the landfill section. On returning to the landfill we found all the gulls up soaring, with an eagle or two overhead. After three hours of intensive searching, we gave up and continued the errands. This bird is likely to still be in the area. We checked the aggregate plant several times (next to the landfill) until the plant closed at 3 pm. We observed the bird from about 150 feet away in sunlight. The bird was vivid bleach white, with an all black beak and white head. The bird was slightly smaller and less bulky than the Herring Gulls in close proximity. The breast was pure white. The back was barred from the upper back to the base of the tail with fine, light brown bars. The underwings were pure white and the uppersides of the primaries were lightly edged in light brown (folded primaries showed a line of triangular-shaped light brown patches). The secondaries were pure white. The legs were light pink. Besides the Iceland Gull, we had one adult Lesser Black-backed Gull. The gull flock was about 60 percent Ring-billed, 35+ Herring, a few Greater Black-backs. Good luck! George Jett Waldorf, MD ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================