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Coastal256 g
What the Mediterranean Gull sounds like
ID tip
The Mediterranean gull is slightly larger and bulkier than the black-headed gull with a heavier bill and longer, darker legs. The breeding plumage adult is a distinctive white gull, with a very pale grey mantle and wings with white primary feathers without black tips. The black hood extends down the nape and shows distinct white eye crescents. The sharp-tipped, parallel sided, dark red bill has a black subterminal band. The non breeding adult is similar but the hood is reduced to an extensive dusky "bandit" mask through the eye. This bird takes two years to reach maturity.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
When to see the Mediterranean Gull
One bar for each month, and every month is filled: this bird is recorded here in all twelve. The wide bar is April, the month with the most records.
Where to see the Mediterranean Gull
The map shades 57 countries with regular records, and 4 more in a lighter tone where the bird turns up only as a stray. Everything unshaded has no records. Countries are listed below the map.
Recorded as a rare visitor in Finland, Luxembourg, Gambia, Jordan.
About the Mediterranean Gull
The Mediterranean gull is a small gull. The scientific name is from Ancient Greek. The genus Ichthyaetus is from ikhthus, "fish", and aetos, "eagle", and the specific melanocephalus is from melas, "black", and -kephalos "-headed".
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Easily confused with
Audouin's GullIchthyaetus audouiniiAudouin's gull is a large gull restricted to the Mediterranean and the western coast of Saharan Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.
Pallas's GullIchthyaetus ichthyaetusThis is a very large gull, being easily the world's largest black-headed gull and the third largest species of gull in the world, after the great black-backed gull and the glaucous gull.
Sooty GullIchthyaetus hemprichiiThe sooty gull is a species of gull in the family Laridae, also known as the Aden gull or Hemprich's gull.
Side by side: Mediterranean Gull vs Pallas's Gull
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