Many years ago, I volunteered with another naturalist in the Chippewa National Forest. Just for fun, he would point at a herring or ring-billed gull, and tell his audience that he would give them a dollar if they could guess that bird. Without fail, someone would answer "seagull." He would then say, "No. There's no such thing as a seagull." If you look it up any field guide, you will find that he was correct.
The bird that most people know as the seagull is actually the herring gull. It is a large gull; adults have a white head and breast, a yellow bill and eyes, a grey back, and black wing tips with white spots. The immature herring gull has a black bill tip, and the adult gulls have a red spot on the inferior (bottom) part of the bill. There are many variations in the plumage of the herring gull, which depend on such things as age and time of the year.
In Great Lakes legends, the gulls were the spirits of the lost sailors. It was considered good look to have one land on your ship, and bad luck to shoot one.
I took the pictures for this article more than a month ago in the Grand Marais Harbor. There are numerous species of gulls in Grand Marais, Minnesota during the year, but the herring gull is the most common. They tend to gather around large bodies of water, and you can't get any bigger than Lake Superior in the middle of North America.
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