Changing Heads

The first Black-headed gulls honouring their names have now appeared. The dark head is their summer attire and this makes them much easier to tell apart from the white headed, and very common, Common Gulls. This winter I have been testing my ID skills on flying city gulls. Black-Headed gulls are much more keen to pick scraps from the ground in busy streets and their flight is quite bouncy. The white front of their wing primaries can also be very obvious. I found the almost completely molted individual above in a local park on Valentine's day, and later, in a flock, only a couple of individuals have completed the molt, while most are on their winter plumage.