Chasing a Black-headed Needle In a Haystack (part 3)

This story continues from (part 1), (part 2)

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We stood on the banks of the Niagara River staring at a ginormous flock of seagulls.

Imagine five football field lengths of this...and twice as dense. Then you'll have the gull concentrations at Lewiston Docks.

Thankfully, Brad is a patient and knowledgeable birder. Cross that with an obsessive desire to finally nail his NY nemesis, he needed all the eyes he could train on this flock.

He explained the gulls’ mojo and how to gain visual control of the chalky mob:

They float for awhile, then they rise and fly back upriver before floating down again. Follow the upriver flight route so your binoculars can train a bird as long as possible. Scope out the gulls with black heads, as the lone rarity is in breeding plumage.

Scan the underwing of each individual. The Bonies’ underwings are gray and/or white. Little Gulls are almost entirely black. Black-headed’s have a triangle of black which covers about a third of their underwing. And by god, if you see one, give me a reference point somewhere on the opposite bank!

You know, after I’d trained my bins on my first Little Gull, and my second and third, the intricacies of gull ID didn’t seem so out of reach. I was digging it. I was able to follow a single gull and examine its field marks on the fly.

As the minutes and hours pressed on, I got a pretty good handle on the entire flock within my view.

The Bonies were crazy abundant. This one here has not yet developed its black head. 

Bonaparte's Gull by Brad Carlson

A dozen or so Little Gulls dotted the cloud of Bonies.

Little Gull photo by Brad Carlson (Canon 400 mm lens).

A few Herring Gulls, Glaucous Gulls, and one Iceland Gull also made appearances.

If you squint REALLY, REALLY hard you can see an Iceland Gull sitting on the water.

As for the Black-headed, we kept looking, and looking and looking. We held conversations with our eyes pasted to our lenses. We leaned quivering elbows on the No Parking sign. We warmed frozen knuckles in a pocket while the other set clutched binoculars.

We KNEW the bird was there. We could feel it.

I looked longingly at the thicker concentration of gulls around the bend at Queenston. There were too many and too far away. If there was a raft tethered to the dock I may well have “borrowed” it. If I’d had a wetsuit I may have swum there…

But eventually, we had to admit it was time to leave. The clock had struck half-past 1 pm and our quick check of the river turned up empty. 

We had traveled TWO hours in the rain across a HUNDRED miles to scan a flock of FIVE THOUSAND birds hoping that this ONE Black-headed Gull would flash its underwings at us.

Our gull had no such gall.

And so we left. Slowly. Reluctantly. Looking over our shoulders as the docks faded out of sight.

Despite striking out on the gull, I left unable/unwilling to admit defeat, because what seemed so crazy and impossible at the start of our adventure had, by the end, seemed completely sane and doable.

You see, it wasn’t that the needle wasn’t there for us to find  in the haystack, it’s that we didn’t have enough time at the site to find it. In a strange, twisted, birder-kind-of-way, there’s a difference.

Whether that’s improved birding skillz or the insanity of addiction at work, you be the judge.

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What have YOU done to chase a good bird?

Share your story in the comments.

* Thanks to Brad for sharing his photos for this post.

For an informative tutorial on these three small gull species, with pretty pictures, go to the Small Gulls post over at Nikon’s Birding To The EDG blog.