A gallery of Bonaparte's gulls

Last Monday, I headed afield well before the crack of dawn. My destination was a wetland complex not too far to the north. I lugged my portable Doghouse blind along, with the intent of capturing some wetland bird species by utilizing it as cover. So, before the sun had pulled itself over the horizon, I was slogging the blind and a bunch of gear through a marshy quagmire. Upon arriving at a good spot, with the sun to my back and a nice marshy pond before me, I quickly set things up. Doghouse blinds are fantastic, and set up in minutes (see more about them HERE). Folding them up properly is more problematic, but that's another story.

I was buoyed by nearby calls of sora and Virginia rails, two species I had high hopes for photographing. A squadron of blue-winged teal rocketed in right as I was preparing to enter the blind, saw me, and rocketed off. Many green-winged teal, ring-necked ducks, and several other species of fowl were in the marsh. As the sun came up, the light became stellar and I crouched in my camouflaged blind awaiting the arrival of subjects.

And waited, and waited, and waited... Nothing, other than a few red-winged blackbirds and swamp sparrows, came into range. Such is life sometimes, but time spent in such a spot as this is never wasted. Even though birds were not frolicking in front of my lens, I could still hear plenty of the sounds of a spring marsh, and see lots of birds moving by. A Virginia rail called regularly, tantalizingly close, but would not reveal itself. Sandhill cranes issued their guttural racket from afar. Crows harassed a red-tailed hawk, and at one point a Cooper's hawk shot by and landed in a distant cottonwood, much to the consternation of local blackbirds. As the temps reached into the high 30's, a few hardy northern leopard frogs began to give their snoring calls.

But photography was my goal, and after two hours of this, I decided to shift location. All the while I was in the blind, I saw small groups of Bonaparte's gulls flying overhead, headed towards a nearby reservoir. I decided to head over there and see what was going on. Smart move.

A Bonaparte's gull, Chroicocephalus philadelphia, wings by. It is an adult, still in basic, or winter plumage.

As I neared the lake, I was greeted by a swarm of perhaps 150-200 Bonaparte's gulls - a nice inland spring concentration in Ohio. After kicking myself several times for not just coming to this spot straight away, I settled in to watch these interesting birds and their fishing activities.

Being early April, the gulls were actively molting into their breeding finery. For a few months during the breeding season, adult Bonaparte's gulls develop an inky black hood. The animal in this photo is a "tweener" - halfway between the white head of winter plumage, and the full black hood it will sport in a few days.

Here we have a gull in which molt is nearly complete. Only a very few white flecks remain on its head.

This gull is early on in the head molt; just starting to get a bit dusky. Observing and shooting these gulls was certainly way easier than the failed blind in the marsh project. The gulls could care less about me. They were mostly actively fishing for shiners and other small piscivorous fare in the shallows along the shoreline. All I had to was stand there, fully exposed, and track them with my camera as if they were feathered skeet. In the world of birds in flight photography, this is pretty easy stuff, although still fun and rewarding when you bag a good shot.

Here's a juvenile, a bird that would have been born last summer. It's distinctive with its black banded tail, and black bars on the wings which are also trimmed in black. It takes Bonaparte's gulls two years to reach maturity. Of this flock, there were only about three juveniles.

I'm sure I've said this before, but I am much more of a bird watcher than a birder. To me, the latter term rightly or wrongly has a listing implication, and I am far more into bird behavior, ecology and identification than just racking up big lists. And few birds are more interesting to observe than Bonaparte's gulls. These are not the dietary garbageheads that many of the larger gull species are, and Bonaparte's gulls will not be caught filching french fries from McDonald's parking lots. These small gulls are consummate fishers, and rather tern-like in their habits. The bird above had just plunged in after a fish, which it missed. Their success rate is normally pretty high, though.

Here's a mottle-head bursting from the water with scaly prey, perhaps a spotfin shiner but I'm not sure. These sorts of shots are a bit tougher, as once the gull has secured its prey, it leaps from the water and is out of there like a shot. This is probably a habit evolved from millennia of dealing with kleptoparasites such as jaegers and larger gulls trying to pounce on them and steal their prey. A successful Bonaparte's gull often has gagged the fish down the hatch before it has flown 50 feet.

A Bonaparte's gull appears to walk on water as it lifts from the surface. These gulls have a long journey ahead of them. They breed in the taiga lands (stunted coniferous forests) of northern Canada and Alaska. Once there, they will make the most unusual nests among the world's gulls - stick nests in trees. That's right, these beautiful gulls are the only arboreally nesting gull species. I once saw one of these nests, in Churchill, Manitoba, while enduring the strafing attacks of an adult. It was about twelve feet up a black spruce and seeing a gull in such a nest was an odd sight indeed.

All in all, it morphed into a wonderful morning of gull observation. Maybe that wasn't my intention at the outset, but you never know what'll happen and just have to roll with the punches.