Bonaparte’s Gull

On 15 and 18 November 2021, Erika and I found Bonaparte’s Gulls at Olympia’s Capitol Lake. These small gulls are handsome birds with bouncy, almost tern-like flight. Bonaparte’s Gulls are locally common migrants in western Washington, as they are across most of North America, but we see them infrequently. Recent DNA work indicates that these birds, although clearly gulls, are not closely related to the larger, white-headed gulls in the genus Larus—they are now placed in the genus Chroicocephalus. In any event, this gull is named after Charles Lucien Bonaparte, an ornithologist at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in the 1820s.