Nick Smith's wildlife photography: Glaucous gull

I decided to head to Dover to see if there was anything interesting in the harbour and to try my hand at gulls in flight (I've said before that flight shots are difficult with the SX50 but with something like gulls, where there are lots of 'willing' subjects, and as they are reasonably predictable in their flight path, they provide good practice). Just before setting out I checked a few of the blogs I follow intermittently, one of which was the blog by Tony Morris http://stmargaretsphotodiary.blogspot.co.uk/ as he is quite local to me. From this I learnt that there was a Glaucous gull at Dover, and a very useful description of where to look for it. I read it, made a mental note and set off. I stopped on the way and invested a massive 45 pence on some value sliced white bread and headed for Dover. When I'd read Tony's blog I had a picture in my mind as to where he was describing to give views down onto some of the roof tops of offices that the gull favoured as a roost. When I got there and went to the place I'd pictured I realised I'd got it totally wrong. I was up high on the cliff above the P&O offices which was a very long way from where I needed to be. To compound my error, there was a tailback of lorries waiting to enter Dover for the port about 1 mile long.

Having eventually made my way to the seafront I walked around the inner harbour, sometimes a good place for a divers, grebes, cormorant or shag, but today it was devoid of any bird life at all save a couple of feral pigeons and a herring gull.

A walk along Prince of Wales pier revealed a small cluster of birders looking towards the disused hovercraft pad. The Glaucous gull was way over towards the back but quite distinguishable from the other gulls by it's overall cream appearance and size. Within seconds of me arriving it took off, flew towards us and circled once before landing near the Cruise terminal. I managed a couple of shots but thought that was going to be it for me.

Glaucous gull on the right ~400metres away.

Everyone else departed at this point but I still had an unused sliced white loaf. I reckoned that if I could see the gull, it, and the others, would see me throwing food out. I walked a little further along the pier and threw slices of bread into the harbour - Frisbee like- to get as much distance as I could. Gulls came from all quarters, including the Glaucous gull and I was able to get quite a few shots.