Glaucous-winged Gull

Watching the salmon run with us on 1 September 2019 at the mouth of Capitol Lake were two immature gulls. These birds fed on barnacles or mussels on nearby bridge supports and appeared to take no interest in the fish. Gull identification is always sort of tricky, expecially here in Puget Sound. Here the ranges of Western and Glaucous-winged gulls overlap—Westerns for the south and Glaucous-winged from the north— and the two “species” massively hybridize. In this hybrid swarm, almost no genetically pure birds exist. Frustratingly for birders, these “Olympic” Gulls can not be definitively counted as either species, so neither is counted on our lists. (You would think, by seeing one hybrid, you would get credit for both species.) An exception to this dilemma may be immature Glaucous-winged Gulls, which sport noticeably pale-colored primary feathers.