The bird and its band proved a perplexing mystery.

In October 2024, a bird that is exceptionally rare in Maine—a common gull—was spotted at the golf course at the Samoset Resort in Rockland, Maine.  As we wrote last fall about the species (https://www.boothbayregister.com/article/not-so-common-gull/252231) despite its name, the common gull is not at all common on this side of the Atlantic. It is a species that breeds across Europe and Asia. Its very close relative, now called the short-billed gull, nests from Alaska east to northern Manitoba.

Naturally, many birders traveled to see this rare bird. But things became even more interesting when, the day after the common gull was discovered, a second banded common gull was photographed in Rockland as well. That individual was not relocated, but the original bird, lacking any bands on its legs, remained well into November.

According to our friend, ornithologist and sleuth Louis Bevier (who recently posted the details on the Maine Birds listserve), the photograph of the banded common gull in Rockland appeared to show the numbers 74J on the blue band on its left leg. Incredibly, a banded common gull with those numbers on a blue band on its left leg was documented six and a half years earlier in Massachusetts in April, 2018.

Fast forward to January of this year when birders photographed the same bird in South Portland!

Most of the time when a rare bird appears somewhere, we can never know where exactly from where it came. This banded common gull seemed to be offering the tantalizing answer to that very question. Was it banded in a breeding colony in Iceland, the UK, or northern Europe?

Wanting to know the answer to that question, several birders who had photographed the bird over the years tried diligently to track down the band number in European databases and with European researchers. They had no success, and it seemed like a dead end to the mystery.

That’s when bird detective Bevier had an idea. He submitted the band number to the U.S.-Canada banding database but instead of putting “common gull” for the identity he just put in “gull.”

He must have been shocked when the reply came back that the bird had been banded in December 2013 in Massachusetts but had been misidentified at the time of banding as the very similar in appearance (and very common) ring-billed gull!

The answer to where the bird was hatched still can’t be answered, but we now know that this particular common gull has been spending time in New England for more than a decade. If it is going back to Iceland or Europe to nest, we can only hope that it will be spotted and its leg band noted. If not, then maybe others will see it and document it, wherever it is going.

Thanks to Louis Bevier for sleuthing out this mystery and sharing it with the birding world!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. He is a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” book and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the popular books, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” (Tilbury House) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide,” (Cornell University Press).