Getting Familiar With The Gulls, Crows and Robin

Hi. Let's get to know some more birds. Birding in the Garden is becoming a bit wider than the garden isn't it? But you do get these birds in the garden too. There are five birds to meet today: the Black-headed Gull, the Herring-gull, The Carrion Crow (and briefly the Hooded Crow), the Rook and the Robin (European Robin to Aussies or Americans) . Let's go! PS sorry for the delay I honestly spent most of it making and collecting the information for this post (some of it I didn't know before either!).
With credits to the dudes/babes who took the Great Black-headed Gull and Tenerife/Gran Canaria Robin photos. Cheers. 

The Gull Terms

The Gull Groups

The gulls are separated into groups called the small gulls and large gulls. The small gulls are small gulls to state the total obvious and the large gulls are large gulls. The Black-headed Gull falls into the small gulls category and the Herring-gull is a large gull. A word of warning: DO NOT USE the dumb term SEAGULL even for that most maritime of gulls, the Kittiwake (known as the Black-legged Kittiwake to those from countries were both Black- and Red-legged Kittiwakes occur).

The Gulls

The Herring-gull

juvenile

The Herring-gull is a medium large gull. The yellow eye has a particularly fierce expression, like all large gulls. The heavy yellow bill with it's red spot (used as a sign to the chicks showing them where the regurgitated fish will come out of) emphasizes this. The back is a light blue-grey with a white crescent shape on it. The wingtips are black with white spots known as "mirrors" on them. The legs are flesh-coloured with webbed feet (all gulls have webbed feet). The juvenile bird is mottled dark brown, and a bird with any amount of brown on it is an immature. In non-breeding (or winter) plumage, the head is streaked grey-brown. This is a different shade to the immature's brown mottling and the bird loses the juvenile speckles on the head first so no confusion. The sexes are indistinguishable.

non-breeding

breeding

The Black-headed Gull

The Black-headed Gull is a small gull, not as small as the Little Gull (hence the name it is tiny). The summer breeding adult bird is unmistakable. You may be thinking how do I tell the difference between this species and the Great Black-headed Gull? Size. Check out this photo I found to illustrate:

Great Black-headed Gull. The bird in the foreground is a Black-headed Gull (not a Great one) and the birds  gathered around it are Lesser Crested Terns. This is not a UK individual as we find no Lesser Crested Terns in the UK.

The bill of the Black-headed Gull is red with no yellow on it and quite slim. The legs too are red. The back is a pale blue-grey and has no white crescent. The wingtips are black with narrow mirrors. The "hood" of the adult breeding bird is chocolate-brown (not black) and there is a white orbital ring. There are many other gulls with black heads but the depth of colour on these gulls' heads is greater than on the Black-headed Gull (they are fully black not brown). These include: Little Gull, Mediterranean Gull, Bonaparte's Gull (not UK), Sabine's Gull, Franklin's Gull (not UK), Laughing Gull (not UK). The sea terns have black caps and are closely related to the gulls but have forked tails and the black only extends to the eye.  

breeding

eclipse

non-breeding

The Crow Terms

Alternative Names

There are not many notable crow terms apart from alternative names. The Carrion Crow is known to most Brits as just the Crow. The old name, still used by some Brits is the Corbie but this is also what some people call the Raven which we which we will not be talking about today.

The Crows

The Carrion Crow

The Carrion Crow is a rather large, fully black bird. Everything about it is black. Black plumage, black bill, black legs, black eye. The wingtips are "fingered" that is the primaries are spread out into separate mini wings that look like fingers. The legs are feathered and when the bird flies the tail is fanned.  

Hooded Crow, now declared a seperate species,
Corvus cornix.

The top mandible (top half of the bill) is partly feathered.  The sexes are indistinguishable. The Hooded Crow used to be considered a subspecies of the Carrion Crow. The Carrion Crow is Corvus corone and the Hooded Crow is Corvus cornix but they used to be Corvus corone corone and Corvus corone cornix. The two (although separate

Hooded x Carrion hybrid crow. This one
happened to be a juvenile
individual.

species) sometimes hybridise. 

The Rook

The Rook is very similar to the Carrion Crow but is more colonial, which one old country saying notes: one Rook is a Crow, one thousand Crows are Rooks.  The Rook can also be distinguished from the Carrion Crow by the naked face and less chunky bill. The feathers on the thighs are less neat than the Carrion Crow, giving what I like to call the "cut-off  jeans effect". Every thing about the Rook except the bare face and legs are black. The tail is more squared than the Carrion Crow's tail.

The Robin Terms

Classification

The European Robin used to be considered a Thrush (a member of the Turdidae) but now is considered a Chat (subfamily Saxicolinae). The Chats (formerly known as Chat-thrushes) used to be considered all Thrushes but are now considered Old World Flycatchers.

Other "Robins" 

This is the European Robin we will be meeting today. It is known in Anglophone Europe as simply the Robin. The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is a thrush and was named by the European explorers because it's red breast reminded them of the Robin of their homeland. The Rufous-collared Robin (Turdus rufitorques) is a close relative of the American Robin. It is pretty much a European Blackbird (another species with an American bird named after it) with a red breast and collar. The Scarlet Robin  (Petroica multicolor), is a bird of Australia, known down under as the "Robin Redbreast" but is more closely related to our European Jay (yet another bird with an American version: the Blue Jay).  It belongs to the Petroicidae, commonly known as "Australasian Robins" (Austraylia mayte!) . The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is called by aviculturalists the Pekin Robin. Another group of Old World Flycatchers is the Magpie-robins, the Copsychidae. The national bird of Bangladesh is one of these, the Oriental Magpie Robin. Good on you, people of Bangladesh! 

Subspecies 

There are loads of subspecies of Robin (I can't keep writing European all the time (!!!) so I will just write Robin as I'm a Brit). The British Robin and Western European (British birds have straight line between brown and red on the fore head and European birds a curved line): Erithacus rubecula melophilus. The Robin of Northwestern Africa, Corsica and Sardinia (shorter wings): E. r. witherbyi. The northeasternmost birds (washed out colour and large size): E. r. tataricus. The southeast birds of the Crimean Peninsula: E. r. valens. Birds of the Caucasus and North Transcaucasia: E. r. caucasicus. The birds southeastwards into Iran: E. r. hyrcanus. Madeira and Azores Robins: E. r. microrhynchos. 

Canary Islands Robins

The Canary Islands are home to two very distinct Robins. They have white eye rings and very dark red breasts. They may even be two separate species (not subspecies of the European Robin, nor subspecies of each other). The cytochrome b sequence song indicate that the Canaries Robins are very distinct and have been separated from the mainland for some 2 million years! The two Canaries Robins (Gran Canaria/Tenerife) are well genetically distinct between each other. They are still considered subspecies of mainland Robins but I think they should both be separate species of their own. The Gran Canaria Robin is E. r. marionae  and the Tenerife Robin is E. r. superbus but they should  not have that rubecola there! I high lighted the whole paragraph except this bit because it is all awesome!!!!!!

Gran Canaria Robin

Tenerife Robin

Nice cytochrome b song there, Canaries Robins!

Alternative Names

I will only mention Anglophone names for the Robin (other than Robin obviously!) because I am English (well, born in England, one parent half-Scottish, one Welsh!) and I am totally crap at spelling and I once said (as a typo of Merle, the Scottish name for Blackbird) "merde" which means s*** in French and I am not making that mistake again (IMBECILE). So, there we go. Only English speakers (or people who know English) can read this anyway. The term Robin comes from the old British name of Robin Redbreast (don't confuse with the Australian "Robin Redbreast" as mentioned in Other Robins). This comes from the time when the Robin was just called the Redbreast to the English but people liked giving birds they often saw (as it is hard to tell apart individuals so people thought it was the same bird every time) a name. One person decided to call their "local Redbreast" Robin. So he (the man) decided to tell his friends about Robin the Redbreast so he (the bird) became known as Robin Redbreast but in time his name was shortened to just Robin without the Redbreast and was given to all individuals of the species. Other English names are "Robinet" or "Robinette" and "Ruddock" and of course the Redbreast. The name Redbreast comes from the time when the orange (fruit) had not been introduced to Britain. People called the Robin's breast red because the name for the colour of orange did not yet exist in Britain and red was the closest thing to it. When the orange fruit was introduced the name was not changed because it was catchy alliteration (epic).

The Robins

The European Robin

British Robin at Portsdown Hill photo taken by Me the
Woodcock (see the post before this one)

It was a bit dumb putting a sub heading saying The Robins as there is only one Robin to be meeting today. I will not go through all the differences between subspecies because 1) I don't know much about them and 2) as a beginner I think it would be too presise (unusual for me to say that about bird id!) and it would be too confusing. The most noticeable part of the Robin  and where the old Redbreast name came from is the orangy-red breast. This covers the face too. The face is outlined in grey and a greenish colour but this is hard to see in the field. The underparts including undertail coverts (known as just the undertail by beginners) and vent are white or in some subspecies may be darker but is always lot paler than the upperparts and cap (the crown all the way down to the eyes). The eye is dark, as is the bill. The wings, upperparts, uppertail and cap are a grey-brown colour. 

Bye

Well, these are some very common birds that you will see lots. Get watching. You should get Robins come to your wildlife garden lots. Please comment!

Bye! xxx :o)