Ok, you're going to have to bear with me here and take my word for it that there are considerably better photos than mine available of this bird which clearly show that it is a 2nd winter Kumlien's gull and not a standard Iceland gull. Not helped by the fact that the bird shows wear and bleaching in the primary tips which makes them look as pale as a typical Iceland gull, the light this evening was really atrocious. The birds were often silhouetted in the sun, and even with the sun behind us it was so bright as to completely burn out most features on this almost white bird. However, photos taken yesterday at much closer range and in much less harsh light show that although the primary tips are bleached the base of P7-P10 are brown and not pale grey or white which is correct for Kumlien's.
With the benefit of that information, even on some of my photos you can, perhaps, see that P7-P10 are darker than the others. Even so, I have to say that if this bird dropped into the Pennington Flash gull roost at 400m, 30 minutes after sunset, on a bleak, wet and windy December evening, I don't think that I'd be calling it anything other than a typical 2nd winter Iceland gull.
This was only my second Kumlien's gull, the first was at Seaforth on 31/01/1998 and was an adult.
On this photo in particular you can see the darker bases to the outer primaries.
In an industrial kind of way it's actually quite a scenic place.
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