A nearly seven year-old mystery has been solved. The solution also presents many more questions.
Last fall, Maine birders might recall that on Halloween Evan Obercian found a European Common Gull (Larus canus canus) at Rockland. The following day, Magill Weber and Ethan Whitaker looking for that bird found what they assumed was the same bird. But after photos were posted, their bird was discovered to have a color band on its left leg. That banded bird was seen there only on that day, November 1st. Evan's bird stayed until November 20th.
Magill and others tried to discern the banding code on the blue band. The photos were poor, but "74J" in white text seemed to fit. This linked the Rockland bird to an adult Common Gull seen at Cohasset, Massachusetts, April 15, 2018 by Marshall Iliff and others.
On January 18th this year, Glenn and Anna Hodgkins took photos of gulls roosting at Mill Cove in South Portland. They noticed afterwards that one was a Common Gull, and it was banded with a blue band that read "74J" on its left leg. Clearly this was the same bird seen in Rockland two and a half months earlier and six years and nine months earlier in Massachusetts.
Magill and Marshall have tried to find out when and where the bird was banded, searching mostly in European ringing databases. Marshall noticed a similarity of the blue band to those being applied to Ring-billed Gulls in Quebec. So with the possibility that the bird was misidentified when banded, I submitted the code to www.reportband.gov without providing an identification, filling in the type of bird only as a "gull."
Today I got a reply. This Common Gull was banded at Revere Beach, Massachusetts December 19, 2013. It was identified as a *Ring-billed Gull* and aged as "hatched in 2012 or earlier." If not aged as a second winter bird at the time, then it might have been an adult when banded. Revere Beach is 14.30 mi (23 km) from where it the bird was next seen at Cohasset beach in 2018.
How long has this bird been in North America or returning here? Where does it spend the summer? Newfoundland? Iceland? The first European Common Gull records for western Greenland date back to the 1890s. The first for Massachusetts was a specimen taken February 8, 1908 at Chatham. Nearby, Nova Scotia's first record was March 9, 1969 on Sable Island, and Maine's first confirmed record was in 2000 (earlier records are not, so far as I know, clearly identified beyond Mew Gull, the name that formerly included North America's Short-billed Gull and the Eurasian taxa of Common Gull).
Here is the history of 74J as we know it.
Banded 19 December 2013
Revere, Suffolk Co., Massachusetts at 42.40778, -70.99083
Photographed 15 Apr 2018: Cohasset, Norfolk Co., Massachusetts
https://ebird.org/checklist/S44607307
Photographed 1 Nov 2024: Rockland, Knox Co., Maine
https://ebird.org/checklist/S200986026
Photographed 18 Jan 2025: South Portland, Cumberland Co., Maine
https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/629300281
Louis Bevier
Fairfield, Maine
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