Christine's walking & birds blog

A white-winger was at Ardmair this afternoon. From the smaller size and shorter bill in comparison with the glaucous, I would say it was an Iceland gull. The flight was also light and buoyant, not so ponderous as the glauc.



Then I realised there were two.


They were feeding in exactly the same way as the gulls in town yesterday, hanging on the wind above where the sea was pounding the beach, and plunging to take morsels of food from the breaking waves. The only difference was that the other gulls were herring or great black-backed, whereas yesterday there were common and black-headed among them. I sat on a wet boulder to take the pictures, with Greger shielding me from the wind.

Again, we tried to walk a bit, but were defeated in the end by the wind. We didn't mind; we went home to leftover turkey dinner with the trimmings, which was lovely. We'd eaten the original dinner on the 23rd December, so this year we've moved back one more day. At this rate, we'll eventually be able to have our Christmas dinner at Easter and get rid of Christmas altogether.