Ringbills don’t mind people if they can have our scraps

Hereabouts, there is a thriving contingent of gulls that don’t quite provide any seashore ambience where they flock … to the parking lots of big box stores, fast-food restaurants and other such coattails of mankind. Mmmm. Garbage is good wherever a scavenging bird can find it.

Gulls don’t nest here. But as winter migrants, they do hang out here for months at a time. Some immature, non-breeding gulls may spend most of the year here.

An ongoing 2022 listing of birds sighted and identified in Kentucky includes 13 species of gulls. A majority of these species were confirmed in far western Kentucky’s big lakes area and around the tailwaters of Kentucky and Barkley dams, a significant attraction for migrant gulls.

The most commonly encountered gull here and over a wide swath of the interior United States, however, is the ring-billed gull.

Ringbills nest in the upper tier of the U.S., especially in the upper Midwest, the Great Lakes region and northern New England. The nesting range also carries over into much of southern Canada and up into the Maritimes. Meanwhile, their winter migration swoop takes in both eastern and western coasts of the U.S. plus most of the southern interior states and far south into Mexico and the Caribbean.

This gull has a light gray upper body with a white head. With long wings and a long slender tail, the ringbill is generally about 17.5 inches long, but it sports a wingspan that stretches to about 4 feet. Those wings are tipped with contrasting black and white markings.

The ringbill, crow-sized for comparison, has a distinctive, name-giving characteristic in a black, ring-like band that encircles the beak near its tip. That black marking around the bill is the short-cut identifier of this avian critter.

Young birds that have not reached breeding age have brownish streaks on upper body and head. That color variation may suggest a different species, but the ringed beak confirms that they are the same varmints.

Once, ringed-billed gulls’ very existence was threated by humans collecting the eggs of the ground-nesting birds, and their ranks were badly depleted by people killing adults for commercial sale of their plumage.

Migratory bird legislation stopped all that abuse to stabilize numbers of ringbills, then in years since then, the gull species has learned to embrace and flourish from the advantages of living in close proximity with the human species that once threatened them.

Once protected, ringbills were free to make the best of food sources found near people. That continues today, and these gulls have prospered across the continent as a result. They are easily the most common gull species in the U.S., and the way they make a living reveals them as the most visible, too.

Scavengers who will eat almost anything that will fit into those little beaks, ring-billed gulls are a routine sight around landfills where they flock to dine on garbage or most anything organic. In suburban or urban areas, the gulls substitute pavement for sand and parking lots for beaches. In the midst of human development sprawl, ringbills show up on these asphalt dunes to feed and lounge in sometimes Hitchcock-like, scary numbers.

Ringed-bill gulls are common around the lots of fast-food restaurants, eating the inadvertent waste that customers drop and/or toss out. They are so ubiquitous on these lots that the species has earned a descriptive secondary name as French fry gulls. The boiled-in-oil fries have become a standard fare for the visiting migrants.

Indeed, I worry that ringbills eat so much deep-fried stuff around fast-food joints that it might be raising the flocks’ cholesterol content to unsafe levels.

Meanwhile, other ringed-bill gulls are just as fast to flock to freshly turned agricultural fields, when plowing flips a layer of soil to reveal worms and other invertebrates on the surface. I’d rather have French fries, but these are probably healthier (higher in protein) for the birds.

Garbage at landfills, French fries and burger bits at fast-food restaurants, or maybe wriggly invertebrates in farm fields, it is all good with these gulls. To paraphrase The Three Amigos, wherever someone puts or uncovers potential food on the ground, ringbills will be there.

At the same time, ring-billed gulls are common on our rivers and lakes. The waters hereabouts draw plenty of them where they roost afloat and, during waking hours, forage and scavenge for a huge variety of aquatic stuff and otherwise that is found on and near the surface of those waters.

A great deal of the ringbill population is restricted to the interior of North America and never experiences saltwater habitats. This species is thriving across the U.S., far from the seashore, in large part because these gulls aren’t picky about what they eat — and they don’t mind hanging out in close proximity to humans to relish their scraps.