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Sooty Gull | Ichthyaetus hemprichii
Hemprichs meeuw | Gaviota Cejiblanca
The Sooty Gull is a dark, medium-sized gull of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the coasts of Arabia and East Africa. In southern Africa it is a very rare vagrant that drifts south from the north along the Mozambique coast.
Voice
A hoarse, plaintive kee-aaw and a drawn-out laughing series; usually silent in the region.
Recording: David Darrell-Lambert — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
42–45 cm. A bulky, long-winged gull with a long, heavy bill, yellow-green with a black band and a red tip. Adults have a dark sepia-brown hood and throat, a white half-ring above the eye, a white collar between the brown throat and the grey-brown breast, and dark grey-brown upperparts. The wing is dark with a white trailing edge; the tail is white. The legs are greenish yellow. Immatures are plain grey-brown, without a white collar, with a black tail band and a grey-blue bill with a dark tip.
Confusion species
Lesser Black-Backed Gull Larus fuscus has a white head and underparts and a yellow bill with a red spot, without a brown hood. Immature Kelp Gulls Larus dominicanus are also dark brown, but larger and heavier, with an all-black bill and a paler, mottled head. The brown hood with the white collar and the two-toned bill make an adult Sooty Gull unmistakable.
Habitat
Inshore waters, harbours, sandbanks, estuaries and fishing beaches, where it eats fish offal and carrion and robs other seabirds. It often rests on beaches among terns.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of southern Africa.
Range and movements
A few records in the region on the coast of Mozambique, mainly in the south and around Inhambane, and exceptionally further south to KwaZulu-Natal. It breeds on islands in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, and winters along the East African coast to Kenya and Tanzania.
How and when to look
The best chance of this species is on fishing beaches and in harbours along the southern Mozambique coast, among flocks of Grey-Headed Gulls and terns. A brown-hooded gull with a white collar is always worth photographing.
Conservation status
Not threatened; the IUCN lists it under the older name Larus hemprichii. The population is confined to a relatively small area and is vulnerable to oil pollution and disturbance of breeding islands. Of no conservation significance in southern Africa.
Scientific name
Ichthyaetus hemprichii | (Bruch, 1855)
Bruch described the species in 1855 as Larus (Adelarus) Hemprichii; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Ichthyaetus was introduced in 1829 by Kaup. Ichthyaetus is Greek, from ikhthus 'fish' and aetos 'eagle', hence 'fish eagle'. hemprichii honours the German naturalist Wilhelm Hemprich (1796–1825), who died on an expedition to Egypt and the Middle East. The specimen the first description was based on came from the Red Sea.