White-eyed gull | Ichthyaetus leucophthalmus

Voice

A high, plaintive, nasal voice, thinner and sharper than that of the large gulls: a drawn-out keeah and a rapid barking kek-kek-kek in a squabble over fish. Around Eilat harbour that sound is the background noise of the early morning. Birds out at sea are usually silent.

Identification

A slim, long-winged gull with a head that suggests a tern rather than a herring gull. In breeding plumage it wears a jet-black hood running down onto the throat, marked with two sharp white eyelid crescents that almost close into a ring; the name comes from those. The bill is strikingly long, thin and slightly drooping, dark red with a black tip, and simply reads black at range. The upperparts are dark slate-grey, the underwing dark, the breast grey and blending into a white belly; the tail is white and the legs yellow. In winter the hood dulls and becomes flecked with white. Juveniles are coffee-brown with pale feather fringes, a black bill and a broad black tail band, and take two to three years to reach adult plumage.

Confusion species

Sooty gull is the only species this can really be confused with, and both stand on the same beach spit at Eilat. The head settles it: jet black and reaching down over the throat on white-eyed, dark chocolate-brown on sooty, where the brown continues into a clear breast band. The bill differs more still: long, thin and dark red with a black tip against short, heavy and two-toned — yellow-green with a black band and a red tip. Beyond that, white-eyed is smaller, slimmer and darker grey above, with a finer head and a lighter flight. Audouin's gull, which occurs on Israel's Mediterranean coast, has a white head, a pale grey mantle and dark legs, and only the silhouette recalls this bird. Mediterranean and black-headed gulls are white-winged and far paler above.

Habitat

Rocky shores, coral and sand beaches and the shallow sea in front of them, plus fishing harbours, jetties and floating fish farms. It breeds in loose colonies on bare coral and sand islets along the Red Sea. It feeds close to the surface: small fish taken on the wing, offal behind the boats, and whatever the beach and the reef flat provide.

Range and movements

Effectively the entire world population stays within the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden; away from those coasts it is a vagrant. This guide's map clips the northern edge of that range: the Gulf of Aqaba as far as Eilat. There the bird is not a rarity but a fixture: present all year in small numbers, and virtually every record from the region comes from that one corner at Eilat and Aqaba. Single birds have reached the Levantine Mediterranean coast north to Lebanon, Turkey and Greece, but those remain exceptions.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

At Eilat walk the promenade down to the marina and work the beach spits and breakwaters from there; early in the morning the birds sit low and close. A second reliable spot is the mouth of the salt canal and the fish ponds north of town, where they loaf with herring and Armenian gulls. Take in all ages: a brown first-year with a black bill is exactly the bird on which the comparison with sooty gull has to be made sharp.

Conservation status

The Red List does not place the species among the threatened, but the margin is thin: the whole world population breeds along a single sea, on islets close to busy shipping lanes and fast-growing coastal cities. Oil pollution from a tanker accident, disturbance of breeding islets and egg collecting are the risks that count. Because the birds follow fishing boats, their numbers are also tied to the state of Red Sea fisheries.