Ring-billed Gull (Mr. Mine)

We drove up through Pennsylvania to upstate New York.  When we hit Fulton (still a half hour from Lake Ontario), we started to see "seagulls."  This one was sitting outside of a Wendy's over the parking lot, probably waiting for someone to drop a scrap of food.  Fulton is a suburb of Syracuse, NY.  The Oswego River runs through it, and there are scattered trees and shrubbery in neighborhood lawns.  It was a hot day--Saturday June 20th; 82 degrees Fahrenheit and relatively humid.

It is a bit of a difficult task to accurately identify gulls.  There are tons of them, and they all look very similar.  Considering our location, I narrowed it down to either the Ring-billed or Herring Gull.  Both have white bodies with grayish wings.  At the tips of the wings, both birds have much darker gray (sometimes black) feathers.  The true difference lies in the adult beaks and tail feathers.  While both beaks are yellow, the breeding adult Ring-billed Gull has a black ring towards the tip of the beak and white tail feathers.  Herring breeding adult Gulls have plain yellow beaks and dark feathers on the underside of their tails.  This one happened to be a Ring-billed Gull.