Okay, actually, no profit to be made from gull ID as far as I know. But if it's possible to tilt the meter from pure aggravation toward fun, that would be something.
I've been trying to work on Gull ID, but it's all just a blur.
Let's call this an open thread, but with encouragement to post gull pix and let us puzzle over ID together. I'm hoping we can get a nice assortment of gulls from around the country.
Last week I wrote about reporting a banded Caspian Tern that we saw at Bolinas Lagoon. Just a few days later, I got a response from the Bird Banding Lab - it had been banded 8 years ago as a nestling. Fun!
(Yes, I modified the name on the certificate, but otherwise that's what you get for reporting a bird.)
Here's the bird - it has a color band, aka VID (visual ID) band, so we were able to read the number in the field with a scope. The band was C532, black letters on yellow band, with a red band barely visible on the other leg. In a lot of these programs, the plain color band indicates the year the bird was hatched if they're banding nestlings.