Slender billed gull...

Whilst watching porpoises at Strumble I saw a strange looking gull. It was on the water, close in the bay just to the left of the lighthouse. It has to be said the light was bad (1555-ish ) with drizzle . What I saw was a gull that looked odd. It seemed to have a pale yellow-ish beak awith a dark tip. the beak looked out of proportion. The head was white with a dark spot similar to that of that of a WP BHG. The mantle was pale grey the secondaries dark tipped making a continious dark bar with Black tipped primaries overshooting the tail very obviously. It just looked odd but as I examined my ( admittedly limited mental gull list, nothing I would expect to see was making sense.) It seemed small but not smaller than a BHG in fact not that small... It then lifted off the water and clumsily arrived on one of the rock formations that finger into the bay. It gave the impression of being less than totally fit. It also revealed a conspicious dark terminal band on the tail and some pale in the leading edge of the wing. The legs when it landed were pale, I thought, kinda straw coloured.
I did not have a camera and the light was fading fast. I dropped in at Tresinwen in the hope of getting Richard Stonier onto it but unfortunately he was not there. It was more or less dark by the time I got home and I had other things to do so it took some time before I got to my books.
It took some sorting but eventually the penny dropped, the only realistic candidate was a 1st winter Slender Billed Gull. I have seen adults in Spain but this was a bird i did not have experience of.
Take it or leave it, I don't really have any aspirations for it, but it seemed ready to roost , on its own and it may be there in the morning.
Its a strange old world when you have to seriously hold an interior debate as to whether you release such information in the hope that the bird gets nailed or hold back in case you are thought to be stringy.
If it is nailed it will give some people some pleasure , if not everyone can mutter dark condemnations. Probably better than being accused of supression...
allthingsgood Walrus