I didn’t go to The Gull Frolic this year. I decided not to when the invitations went out to Illinois Ornithological Society members last November. I was then looking forward to my trip to San Blas and the thought of coming back to stand on the lakefront in freezing temperatures after spending the early part of January in warm and sunny Mexico did not appeal to me. And anyway, my head was still full of images of Great Black-backed Gulls I had seen in New Brunswick and Grand Manan.
So this post features some of the Great Black-backeds and other species seen as we made our way from St. John to Grand Manan by ferry.
Great Black-backed Gull
The photo below is actually a small section of a larger image. I was trying to focus on the White-Winged Scoters we were seeing from quite a distance. Or as Ann has now corrected me, they were Black Guillemots! We had some Scoters too. But this is sometimes the problem with processing photos half a year or more later.
More of the White-Winged Scoters. Oh they’re not, let’s fix this right now. They are Black Guillemots. I don’t know what happened to the Scoter. Maybe it’s in the third photograph on top — how far away we were at one point…
More Great Black-backed Gulls – and there’s likely a few Herring Gulls in the group shot, but it’s more like a warmer version of a Gull Frolic.
These Red-Necked Grebes were distant but delightful nonetheless.
Sooty Shearwaters don’t photograph particularly well at a distance.
Sooty Shearwater 
A glimpse of a rugged landscape.
Great Shearwaters were abundant and easier to photograph than the Harbor Seals in the first two photographs below.
A few more Great Black-Backed Gulls.
2nd Cycle 
1st Cycle 
And an adult Herring Gull.
I will be back with the other half of this day’s photos. The focus will be on land birds. It took me a week to process the 740-or-so images on my recalcitrant pokey travel laptop. But I guess these days I can’t complain about how long it takes me to do anything.