Since I had been out and taken a lot of photos on Saturday the 5th, I hadn't really planned on taking any photos of Sunday, the 6th. I should have known better.

Around 1:00 I got a call telling me that Ilya had seen a Heermann's Gull out at the Tsawassen Ferry Jetty. I'd never seen a Heermann's, and I knew that they didn't look like the run-of-the-mill gulls around here, so this was an irresisitible development. I called Ilya, who was still with the bird, but he was headed off to look for other stuff. He gave me a rough location on the bird, though, not particularly near the ferry berths but not far away either.

I was in my car and headed to Tsawassen forthwith. I got there at 1:30, paid for parking at the terminal, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed over to the side of the jetty. I started near the berths and walked away from them, scanning the flocks of gulls for something odd.

I soon found something odd, but not the odd thing I was really expecting. What I found was a gull with a translucent white/pinkish end to their bill. I don't know if it was the result of mutation, disease, toxins, or something else. It certainly kept me wondering, though.

I tore myself away from the odd-billed bird to look for the slightly wayward bird. In my bird guides, Heermann's Gulls look quite distinctive, with overall dark coloration, no barring, and a black-tipped red bill. But since I'd never seen one in the field before, I wasn't sure how subtle these marks would be. Sometimes things that look very obvious in the books just don't show up in the field. So just to be safe I was trying to take a careful look at each gull on the jetty.

It turned out that I really needn't have worried. I eventually made it around a little curve on the shore and found Heermann in a small flock of gulls, standing out like a sore thumb with a neon sign on it. I'd definitely never seen any gull like this guy before.

I'm not sure what made him decide to fly off; I wasn't close or moving when he did, and the other birds he was with hadn't budged.

I waited around about fifteen or twenty minutes, but he didn't come back. I would have liked to get closer to him, but I was pretty thankful that I had gotten the call and then gotten a move on to get out there; if I'd been two or three minutes later, I wouldn't have seen him.

As I looked around for other subjects, an odd thing caught my eye. (Yes, everything seemed odd for some reason that day—not different, or unusual, or weird, but odd..) One of the streetlights appeared to have grown little metal thorns.

My theory is that those little spikes are the ferry company's response to the gulls, who like to sit up there and, ummmm, whitewash the light and any cars passing underneath. I'm not sure if the white on the light casing means that it's an ineffectual response, or if it is simply a result of them not having put the deterrents up there when they first installed the light.

Across the road, I spotted another, newer-looking light, with a different piece of anti-gull technology on top. This one certainly seemed effective; that light is awful clean.

That did it for my trip to the ferry jetty; I was happy to have gotten out and seen an interesting new bird, and had been intrigued by the bird with the odd bill. It had been excellent for such a short jaunt.

Jauntily short,
Tom