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Audouin's Gull | Ichthyaetus audouinii
Audouins meeuw | Gaviota de Audouin
A slender, long-winged Mediterranean Gull with a snow-white head, pale grey mantle, dark legs and a short dark-red bill. Its most telling feature is its flight: low and supple just above the surf, with easy wingbeats and long glides, more tern than gull.
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Voice
A dry, nasal voice: a barking kek-kek and a grating garr, without the laughing wail of the big white-headed gulls. Colonies produce a continuous, irritable rasping that carries a long way over water, while birds at sea are usually silent. Once learned, the tone separates it from Yellow-Legged Gull in an Iberian fishing port without raising binoculars.
Recording: Pere Josa — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Adults are white with a pale blue-grey mantle and a long, far-projecting wingtip carrying extensive black and small white tips. The bill is short and deep, coral red with a black band and a pale tip, and simply reads dark at any distance. Legs are olive-grey to almost black, the eye dark inside a red orbital ring, and the forehead slopes evenly so the head looks gentle and dove-like. First-years are cold grey-brown and strongly patterned, with a pale head, white rump and a broad black tail band; the dark legs and the long narrow wing remain the safest features at that age.
Confusion species
Yellow-Legged Gull is the bird to measure it against, since the two share every Mediterranean harbour. That species has a heavy yellow bill with a red gonydeal spot, chrome-yellow legs, a pale eye and an angular, burly head; Audouin's has a short dark bill with the red band that looks plain black at range, dark legs, a dark eye and a softer, rounded crown. Structure differs just as much: longer and narrower wings, a shorter tail, and a light, low passage just above the swell where a Yellow-Legged travels higher and heavier. In a resting flock it stands out by its slim, long-legged outline and by the near-black legs among a row of yellow ones.
Habitat
Rocky islets and cliffs, low sandy islands and spits, salt pans and fishing harbours. It feeds mainly out at sea, quartering low over the water for sardine and anchovy, much of it at dusk and after dark, and follows trawlers for discards. Fresh water is avoided almost completely; the species stays tied to the salt coast.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Essentially the whole world population breeds in the Mediterranean, centred on the east coast of Iberia: the Ebro delta, where the Punta de la Banya for decades held the largest colony in the world with more than two-thirds of all birds, the Columbretes, Isla Grosa, the salt pans of Santa Pola and Torrevieja, the Balearics (Cabrera, Sa Dragonera, Illa de l'Aire) and the Chafarinas off north-west Africa; further colonies lie on Corsica and Sardinia and along the North African coast, with small numbers in the eastern Mediterranean. Outside the breeding season many birds move to the Atlantic coasts of north-west and West Africa, while a growing number now stays on the Algarve and in the Gulf of Cádiz. North of Iberia it is a vagrant, with scattered records from the British Isles and the North Sea coast.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On the western Mediterranean coast, stand on a groyne or harbour wall at first light or late afternoon: that is when birds shuttle low along the surf line and the legs and bill can be judged. The fishing harbours of Castellón, Sant Carles de la Ràpita and Torrevieja put loafing groups at ten to twenty metres when the fleet comes in; outside the breeding season the salinas of the Algarve between Tavira and Faro at high tide are the most reliable place for a first encounter. Take your time over all ages; the cold, contrasty first-years are the plumage to practise on here.
Conservation status
The IUCN Red List again treats the species as Vulnerable, after a spell in which it seemed to be doing well. From about a thousand pairs in the 1960s the population climbed past fifteen thousand pairs once the Ebro delta was colonised in 1981, and the listing was relaxed step by step to Least Concern. Since foxes reached the Punta de la Banya colony in 2017 that core has largely gone and the birds are now scattered over smaller and more exposed sites. Reduced trawler discards, predation by rats and Yellow-Legged Gulls, and disturbance of low-lying islands all add to the pressure.
Scientific name
Ichthyaetus audouinii | (Payraudeau, 1826)
Payraudeau described the species in 1826 as Larus audouinii; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Ichthyaetus was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Ichthyaetus is Greek, from ikhthus 'fish' and aetos 'eagle', hence 'fish eagle'. audouinii honours the French naturalist Jean Victoire Audouin (1797–1841). The specimen the first description was based on came from Sardinia and Corsica.