Mokka mit Schlag

eBay is Unfair to Buyers

2010-02-06T12:49:40Z

Every time I bid on eBay I see this:

Confirm Bid.
You are agreeing to a contract -- You will enter into a legally binding contract to purchase the item from the seller if you're the winning bidder. You are responsible for reading the full item listing, including the seller's instructions and accepted payment methods. Seller assumes all responsibility for listing this item. " title="Review and Confirm Bid" width="882" height="659" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1003060" />

Notice that bit about “You are agreeing to a contract — You will enter into a legally binding contract to purchase the item from the seller if you’re the winning bidder.” Why don’t sellers have to adhere to it too?

Time and again when I finally manage to score a really good deal on something, the seller cancels the auction, refuses to sell the item, tries to change the price or terms after the close of the auction, or otherwise reneges on the deal. If my bid is a contract, why isn’t their listing? Or conversely, if a seller can back out of a deal whenever they feel like it, why can’t a buyer?

eBay provides a valuable service, and network effects have shut down almost all its competitors over time, but buyers and sellers are extremely unhappy with it. Make no mistake, eBay is vulnerable. A savvy competitor could challenge it within a year. Paul Graham figured this out two years ago:

I suspect EBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. As with dating, however, a startup that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.

I wonder if anyone’s taken him up on it? I’m too comfortable in my current job to be very entrepreneurial about this opportunity right now, but if I were to find myself suddenly unemployed, this is probably the arena I’d attack. That said, if anyone wants to go after this and needs the strategy, contact me (or figure it out yourself–it isn’t that hard.) Be warned that like most great ideas, actually implementing an eBay killer is 99% perspiration, but I’d be happy to sell the 1% inspiration for 1% of the company.

Microsoft is Leaving Money on the Table

2010-02-06T01:12:45Z

If Windows were priced similarly to Mac OS X, I would have by now bought at least one full copy each of XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Instead the last non-bundled Windows I bought was Windows 2000 right before XP came out. It’s too damned expensive, and the DRM is too annoying. In fact, I can buy a full computer with Windows for roughly the cost of one Windows 7 license; but I can’t reuse the software on my Mac in Parallels or Bootcamp so I won’t even do that.

If someone cracked Windows 7 activation so I could use it on multiple machines, maybe I could bring myself to pay the $250+ Microsoft wants for a copy; but as is I’ll just do without. Looks like someone’s selling old copies of Vista Home Basic for $99 and Ultimate for $135. Maybe I’ll grab one of those. XP costs $90-300 if you can even find a copy.

Checking prices on Amazon today, Windows 7 Professional retails for about $250 and Windows 7 Ultimate costs around $300. Even an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate costs almost $200. By way of contrast, Mac OS X Snow Leopard costs about $25; there’s no annoying activation to fight with; and you can install it clean on as many machines as you like. If you want to pay a little more attention to the legalese, then you can buy a 5-license family pack for under $50. The current version of Windows is literally 10 times as expensive as the current version of Mac OS X, and that’s being generous to Windows. If we compare to Ultimate edition instead, Windows is twelve times as expensive. If we want to install it on 5 computers, it’s 20-24 times as expensive. Perhaps I’m being a little unfair since Apple’s tight control of hardware means pretty much all Mac OS X sales are upgrades, but even then the cheapest Windows 7 Upgrade is more than 3 times as expensive as Snow Leopard. How’d that happen? Weren’t PCs supposed to be cheaper?

I’ll tell you what happened: Microsoft still has an effective monopoly on PC operating systems, and they’re protecting it. While the price of most software is going down, the price of Windows is going up. Office is below $100, but there’s real competition for word processors and spreadsheets. There’s no competition for Windows Mac OS X won’t run on most PC hardware, and desktop Linux is a failed project. Microsoft figure sit can make more money squeezing people who ar elocked into their platform than by selling a few extra copies to folks like me who have a choice.

Trumpeter Swans

2010-01-31T23:54:21Z

This morning I took a Zipcar out to do some targeted birding on Long Island. First stop was the Timber Point Golf Course West Marina for the Dovekie. However the marina had frozen over and it left overnight. Damn. Should have gone yesterday. And the pictures others got were so cute! These are adorable birds, and you usually have to take a pelagic to get even a quick glimpse of one flying by half a klick away.

Then 30 miles northeast to Upper Lake in Yaphank for my life Trumpeter Swans. The lake had also frozen over, but there was a little water in the far north corner of the lake, and there they were:

Only it turns out to due to captive breeding and release programs Trumpeter Swans aren’t accepted as countable in New York. Double Damn. This is actually the 5th swan species for my list (after Mute, Black, Whooper and Tundra) but only 2–Mute and Tundra–are countable where I saw them.

Apologies for the photo, by the way. The birds were far away, and I’m back to my Tamron 28-300 for the moment while I wait out the rumored 3 Canon releases in February. Maybe I’ll rent a 400 f/4 DO in the meantime. I have been haunting Craig’s List and eBay, but not actually winning anything so far.

The swans had been reported much closer to the publicly accessible viewing area and within easy photo range, but that was before the lake froze over. Fortunately I had a scope. Otherwise I could have never ID’d the relevant field marks on these two. In this photo you can see the large, sloping black bills, and in binoculars you could make out the black legs, both of which rule out the common invasive Mute Swan. However the scope was necessary to establish that there wasn’t any yellow around the eye, which would have tunred thes two into the somewhat more common Tundra swans.

As I was finishing up at Upper Lake, some other birders drove up who reported that they’d heard from the Internet that the Dovekie had been seen today, so I raced back to Timber Point. Only the reports proved wrong. The Internet reports had been of previous days’ sightings. The Dovekie has likely returned to its natural home on the open ocean (we hope). Swim well little bird.

Tagged Gulls ID’d

2010-01-28T12:17:22Z

The USGS has identified both of the tagged Ring-billed Gulls I found recently. As expected, both were tagged by Dr. Tom French in Massachusetts.

A99 from Gravesend Bay was banded at the Upper Blackstone Wastewater Treatment Plant in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 5, 2008. Sex unknown and born in 2005 or earlier.

A288 from Prospect Park was banded at the Quinsigamond State Park in Worcester County, Massachusetts on October 27, 2009, just a few months before I saw it. Sex unknown and born in 2008 or earlier. (Probably 2008 would be my guess based on the bird’s plumage when I found it.)

Prediction: The Apple Tablet is Going to Flop Worse Than the Newton

2010-01-27T13:02:33Z

The more I hear about the rumored Apple tablet coming later today, the more I’m convinced this isn’t going to work. The love child of an iPod Touch and a Kindle might be pretty but it isn’t world changing in the way the iPhone and the Mac were. More to the point, it won’t save the media industry from their own outdated business models. Newspaper publishers and magazine publishers and book publishers are so desperate for some hope of salvation that they’ll swim to anyone who promises to throw them a life preserver, not noticing that the life preserver is made out of lead. Remember, we’re talking about people who think the problem with HTML is that it isn’t more like PDF. The surest sign that a technology will fail is when senior citizen C-level execs are gaga over it.

I could be totally wrong about this, as could everyone else who’s been posting rumors about what the Apple tablet is actually going to be and actually going to do. It could well be that the use case for the tablet is something we haven’t even imagined yet, and if so all bets are off. However, if the fundamental raison d’être for the tablet is simply to be a nice e-book/magazine/newspaper reader with network connectivity and a built-in iTunes content store, it’s DOA. Microsoft made this mistake with Blackbird, MSN, and Silverlight. AOL, Prodigy, Genie, and Compuserve all made this mistake; and it killed three of them, and is slowly killing the last. Apple made this mistake before itself with eWorld. (Remember that?)

The bottom line is that the Web wins. The Web is the content delivery platform. Paid or free, what people want is an open two-way platform based on networked hypertext. Furthermore, that platform should be as open as possible. The more DRM is imposed, the less people will use it. Even a simple registration form is enough to drive more than half of potential readers away. If the content for the iPad isn’t on the Web — if it’s in some nonstandard, closed, non-editable format like PDF that’s served only from Apple’s servers or the servers of big media over some proprietary protocol — the tablet will fail. If the content looks good on an iPad but doesn’t look good in Firefox on Linux, or Chrome on Windows, or in Internet Explorer with JavaScript turned off, the tablet will fail. If you can read an article, but you can’t save it, or e-mail it, or copy and paste from it, the tablet will fail.

Sorry Big Media. This has been tried before and failed before, many, many times. Sprinkling magic Apple pixie dust over a bad business model won’t make it profitable. Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen gave you the most important technological development in publishing since Gutenberg, and you’ve spent 20 years proving you have no clue whatsoever how to use it while teenagers blogging from their parents’ basements beat you up and took your lunch money. A shiny new toy from Apple won’t save you from your own incompetence.

Of course, the rumors could be totally false. Use as an ePaper reader could just be one thing the tablet does, and the one that’s gotten the most ink for the same reason that half the new sitcoms in any given year are set in a TV or radio station. Media folks just love to write about themselves. The Apple tablet could have uses and abilities well beyond some sort of content distribution platform that isn’t the Web. Steve Jobs is way smarter than all the heads of the media empires put together. The Apple tablet could be an open development and distribution platform for Web content, games, portable applications, and more. It could finally give us hand writing recognition that works. It could finally give us voice-recognition that works. It could have a Cablecard slot and a DRM-free DVR. It could give us satellite Internet connectivity from anywhere on the planet and a pony; and if it does, I want one. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Apple manages to completely reinvent how we interact with a general purpose computer. After all, they’ve done it before. But if all the tablet offers is a slightly less locked down version of the Kindle with a color screen and a better user interface, Apple shouldn’t have bothered.

When High Speed Sync Doesn’t Work on a Canon 50D

2010-01-24T20:15:53Z

After months of consulting multiple manuals, books, forums, and experts, I finally figured out why my Canon 50D + 580EXII flash wouldn’t work in high speed sync mode. That is, when I turned on the flash the maximum shutter speed was 1/250s. No matter what I set the ISO, shutter speed, mode, or aperture to, I could never get shutter speed faster than 1/250s. No matter what mode and settings I applied to the flash and/or camera, as soon as the flash was ready, shutter speed dropped to 1/250s. (I could easily take pictures without flash at speeds faster than 1/250s as lighting conditions and settings permitted.)

If you’re encountering this problem on a 50D (and likely other Canon models) here’s what you (probably) need to do:

Turn the camera on. The flash does not need to be attached.
Press the MENU button
Rotate the Main (top) Dial to select the orange camera menu
Use the Quick Control (back) Dial to select “C.Fn I Exposure”
Press the setting button (the one in the middle of the Quick Control Dial)
Rotate the Quick Control Dial until you see option 7, Flash speed sync in Av mode. You will probably note that option 2, 1/250s (fixed) is selected.
Press the setting button.
Rotate the Quick Control Dial to select either option 0, Auto, or option 1, 1/250 – 1/60sec. auto
Press the setting button.
Press the MENU button.
Press the MENU button.

You can now use high speed sync as advertised.

I think the default is option 0, Auto. However if you’ve ever chosen option 2, 1/250s (fixed), then high speed sync is disabled. I suspect I did this last summer when I was mostly shooting bugs at night, and using flash for main light rather than birds in daytime with fill flash.

For me, this means I can finally use fill flash for bird shots. This is a huge help with backlit subjects, and when you’re looking up at a bird into the sky it’s almost always backlit. These two shots of a Downy Woodpecker demonstrate. The left has fill flash shot through a Better Beamer. The right doesn’t. Both were ISO 400, f/5.6. The left was shot at 1/800s; the right at 1/640s in Av mode.

You can sometimes lighten up the shadows in the non-flashed shot in Photoshop/Lightroom or equivalent if you’re shooting raw and it isn’t too dark, but the sky gets blown out and you pick up a lot of noise. This one didn’t come out too badly, but I still prefer the shot with flash, and many photos are not this salvageable:

Hybrid Mallard/Northern Shoveler?

2010-01-24T19:00:48Z

Here’s a weird duck I found in Prospect Park this morning while looking for Friday’s Australasian Shoveler:

At first it had its head tucked in, and I thought it was a Northern Shoveler, but when it swam away the head and bill were clearly Mallard like. Probably can’t be sure without a blood sample, but it looks to me like a Mallard x Northern Shoveler. I’m not sure if this is a known (or even possible) combination. Or it could be a hybrid with some other species. Mallards regularly hybridize with almost anything vaguely duck-like. It could also be an escapee exotic from some distant land like the Australasian Shoveler. Just yesterday I miscalled a Cape Shelduck as an immature Black-bellied Whistling Duck. Or it could be a full-blooded drake Mallard with aberrant plumage.

Anyone ever seen a bird like this before? For that matter, is there a good reference that covers all the world’s waterfowl? As Sibley writes, “virtually any of the world’s waterfowl species can occasionally be seen free-flying in North America.”

Another Tagged Gull

2010-01-28T12:11:12Z

This morning I walked around Prospect Park for a few hours. Nothing majorly new, except for one Cooper’s Hawk in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The feeders were shockingly quiet. Not a bird to be seen. I look for the American Pipit that’s been reported repeatedly on the Long Meadow over the last couple of weeks, but wiffed again even though another birder found it later. However, I did find another wing tagged Ring-billed Gull on Prospect Lake, this one a first winter bird. As best I can make out its number is A288:

Likely all the wing tagged gulls that are showing up lately are coming from Massachusetts where Dr. Tom French has been banding gulls. I should know more shortly. Multiple birders have been reporting them around the city. This is possibly the fourth from Prospect Lake alone.

Update: yep, this bird was banded at the Quinsigamond State Park in Worcester County, Massachusetts on October 27, 2009, just a few months before I saw it. Sex unknown and born in 2008 or earlier. (Probably 2008 would be my guess based on the bird’s plumage when I found it.)

Total species count for the morning was a respectable 27:

Canada Goose
Mute Swan
American Black Duck
Mallard
Northern Shoveler
Bufflehead
Ruddy Duck
American Coot
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Cooper’s Hawk
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Blue Jay
American Crow
Black-capped Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Hermit Thrush
European Starling
White-throated Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco (Slate-colored)
Northern Cardinal

#478 Harlequin Duck

2010-01-17T21:41:11Z

I don’t have a big story to go with this one. Although I whiffed on Harlequin Duck repeatedly at Point Lookout, and even broke my scope trying to find it there over the Thanksgiving break, once I got to Barnegat it was easy. Me and four other folks from the New York City Audubon Camera Club left Manhattan about 6:30 AM and arrived at Barnegat at 9:00 AM. We walked out to the end of the jetty, and there they were:

Oh and some Purple Sandpipers too:

And some Ruddy Turnstones:

And some Long-tailed Ducks:

And Dunlin:

And Black-bellied Plovers:

In fact, there were more of some of these species than I’ve seen in my life, and within easy shooting range. Many of these birds are often seen far away as dots in the scope, if at all. At Barnegat they were naked eye birds. I should have gone there sooner. I did sign up for one previous trip with the Brooklyn Bird Club last year, but it was canceled due to rain. Better late than never.

Total species count for the day was about 30:

Brant
Harlequin Duck
Surf Scoter
Long-tailed Duck
Mallard
American Black Duck
Hooded Merganser
Red-breasted Merganser
Common Loon
Great Cormorant
Black-bellied Plover
Ruddy Turnstone
Sanderling
Purple Sandpiper
Dunlin
Northern Mockingbird
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
American Crow
American Robin
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Savannah Sparrow (Ipswich)
House Sparrow
European Starling
Belted Kingfisher (at the truck stop on I-95)

Although any number of vagrants and accidentals could still show up, there are only a few regular species in New York City still left for my life list. Common Nighthawk is a summer resident. To find it, I need to spend more time in the parks around dusk in the summer. Mourning Warbler comes through every year on migration. It just hides really well. Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow is possible at Marine Park and other locations along the coast. There are also a few species in the city that I only have from elsewhere. American Bittern, for instance, was relatively easy to find at Upper Newport Bay near where I lived in Irvine; but although it breeds in Jamaica Bay I’ve never seen it in New York.

#477 Lapland Longspur

2010-01-19T01:10:20Z

Sunday morning I got up bright and early–well, at least early; it was before dawn–to chase a couple of rarities that have showed up in Brooklyn. The rarest was the Common Gull that Shane Blodgett first found in Gravesend Bay a couple of weeks ago. I’ve seen this bird before in Europe but never in the United States. A Mew Gull–the Pacific subspecies–showed up at San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary while I was living in Irvine last year, but I was never able to find it. The other target was a Lapland Longspur that Rob Jett found on the cricket field at Floyd Bennett Field last Saturday.

I arrived at Bay 16th St. shortly after dawn, and walked across the pedestrian bridge over the Belt Parkway to the bike path that follows the curve of the bay. The temperature was several degrees below freezing and the wind off the bay, while not as bad as it sometimes is, certainly didn’t help matters. I was hoping to quickly find the bird on the grass along the bike path where it had been seen the previous day and several times earlier, but no such luck. A couple of dozen gulls were flying over the bay, but even if a Common Gull were one of them it would be extremely hard to distinguish in this light at that distance. The Common Gull is very similar to a Ring-billed Gull. It’s about an inch smaller and does not show an obvious ring around the bill. Also, the legs are gray instead of dirty yellow, the eye is black instead of yellow, and there is a little more white along the base of the mantle. Exactly none of these field marks are obvious on a flying bird 20 meters away.

I walked up and down along the path waiting for some gulls to come in closer where I might have a chance at picking out a Common Gull. I saw what looked like a couple of fairly large shorebirds fly up the rocks. Heading up the way they proved to be Purple Sandpipers, the closest I’ve ever seen. I had a great deal of trouble finding these a few years ago, and now here they were right in front of me. Unfortunately they weren’t the bird I was looking for today.

I ran into a couple of other birders who had come to look for the gull, and showed them the Purples, and then we hunkered down to wait for the gull. Gulls flew in and out, but no Common Gull. I lasted another hour until about 8:30 when the cold just got too much for me. Since there didn’t seem to be a lot of action happening here, we traded cell phone numbers in case it showed up and I drove over to the end of Bay Parkway where the gull had first been spotted. It looked promising, especially when I realized there was someone from a bakery feeding a large box of stale bread to the rampant gull flock, but although there were numerous Ring-billed Gulls and not a few Rock Pigeons, that was all. The common gull was not to be found here either, at least not this morning.

I continued on to Floyd Bennett Field. I expected to be paged that the gull had appeared as soon as I got on the Belt Parkway, but no such luck. I got to Floyd Bennett Field at 9:00 and drove straight to the cricket field. Sure enough, there were about 20 Eastern Meadowlarks grazing not far from the sidewalk. Was one of them a Longspur? With binoculars I really couldn’t tell, so I went back to the car and got my scope, then carefully walked back, trying not to spook them. Scoping the flock, there was one that didn’t look quite right. It had a lot less yellow than a Meadowlark does, but these were very small birds very far away in grass that, though cut, was almost as tall as they were. How to be sure? I eventually got reasonably confident that it wasn’t a meadowlark, because I could always relocate it amongst the meadowlarks, and although it showed more yellow than I was expecting it didn’t come close to the bright yellow of the meadowlarks.

Sometimes a meadowlark would turn away and not look so lemon yellow, but invariably after it kinked its head back again and especially when it looked straight at you, you’d immediately see a huge splash of yellow. This bird never had that, just a light wash of waxy yellow on only part of its face. And the more I looked at it the more I realized that in profile the facial pattern was different than the meadowlark’s too. This bird had a sort of brown, triangular outline around its face. Bingo. That’s a Longspur. Now which one? Probably a birder with a more experience of Longspurs could have just eyeballed this one, but I haven’t seen but a couple in my life so I needed to be careful and check the field marks and the field guide. Lapland is the most common species around here, but Smith’s and Chestnut-collared are not impossible.

For that I had to go to the back and belly (and consult the field guide again. The belly was a little hard to make out in the grass, but eventually it spent enough time in shorter grass to make it apparent that the belly was white, which ruled out Smith’s. The overall color and patterning on the back looked a lot more like the brighter Lapland than the dull (at this time of year) Chestnut-collared. There it was. #477. I then tried for some better photographs but got nothing more than what you see above, that may not even have the bird in the frame. It was just too far away and too small for my 400mm lens. The scope was necessary. I could not have found this bird with binoculars alone. Shortly after this, the flock left and headed out for wherever they spend the rest of their day. But my day wasn’t over yet.

My cell phone had not yet rung so I figured I had a little bit more time to explore Floyd Bennett Field. I spent a little time in the community gardens, and out along the bay at the end of the archery road and runway 2. I wasn’t really expecting to find anything spectacular. Mostly I just wanted to compare my results with the Canon 400 mm f/5.6L lens to the photographs I had taken at the same location a few weeks earlier with the 300 mm f/4L lens. Short answer: the 400 mm lens is much superior to the 300 mm lens despite the lack of image stabilization. Partially it’s the extra reach, and partially it’s just that it’s a much sharper lens. A few my photographer friends have expressed some surprise that these results and suggested that perhaps I just had a bad copy of the 300 mm lens. That may be so, but if it is, then there’s a real quality control problems at the factory. Certainly, I’ve seen some amazing photographs taken with the 300 mm lens that go way beyond anything I was ever able to achieve with it. I found the 400 mm lens much easier to work with. But enough about cameras. Let’s get back to birds.

I left Floyd Bennett Field about 10:30 and returned to Bay 16th Street for another try at the Common Gull. When I arrived, the bird had still not yet been seen that day. However, shortly after I got there, someone rode up on a bicycle and told us that the bird had been spotted north of us about a mile at the first parking lot past the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. So we all grabbed our scopes and trotted up there. Sure enough, there was a large flock of several hundred goals on the grass near the parking lot. We scoped it repeatedly, spotted one tagged gull, and even chummed the gulls with some bread. No luck. It took a while, but we eventually convinced ourselves that even if the bird had been there, it wasn’t there any longer. Somewhat dejectedly we walked back down to Bay 16th St. Along the way, we heard that the Common Gull had been seen for about half an hour right by the pedestrian overpass where we had started. I let out more than a few choice words. By the time we got back to Bay 16th St., the bird had departed again. This time, however, there were photographs to prove that the bird had indeed been there; and we’d missed it. Fuck.

By now it was almost noon, and I was more than a little hungry. Based on past reports the gull seemed to space its appearances out by an hour or more so I figured it was a reasonably safe time to decamp for lunch. Fortunately I was right. by the time I returned 45 minutes later, the bird had still not been seen again. Although the weather was not quite as bone chilling as it had been at 7 AM, it was still below freezing, and I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. I chatted with a couple of the birders from upstate who driven down to look for the gull and who had been somewhat more diligent than me in sticking with the spot. They still haven’t seen the bird either. At least I didn’t miss it while I ate lunch. That would have been too much.

We casually inspected the several dozen Ring-billed Gulls standing on the grass. No Common Gull. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. This went on for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then suddenly one of the upstaters says, “there’s the bird.” We had no idea where it came from. We hadn’t seen any bird fly in. At first, I couldn’t see the bird but they put me on it quickly. Once I saw it, it was obvious. It was a little smaller, but far more obviously the legs were gray instead of yellow and the bill didn’t have any black ring:

(In case it isn’t so obvious the Common Gull is on the right.)

Still, this is not exactly a bird would jump out at you as different if you were barreling along the bike path at 20 mph. In fact, you’d have to be looking pretty carefully to notice anything different at all. the bird hung out for about 10 minutes before passing car tossed out some litter and attracted the flock to the other side of the pedestrian overpass. In the confusion, the Common Gull took off and likely headed out across the bay somewhere.

Still, as life bird sightings go it was pretty convincing. Or at least it was until I got home and checked my records. I have been saying that this is my first to life bird day in Brooklyn in several years. But when I look at my official life list, I realized I had already seen Common Gull in Europe before. I had missed it previously because I was looking for Mew Gull, which I still haven’t seen. However Mew Gull and Common Gull are different subspecies of the same species, Larus canus. Common Gull is Larus canus canus and Mew Gull is Larus canus brachyrhynchus. Besides location, the subspecies differ mainly in how dark the matle is and how much black is present on the wingtips. These details I leave to the experts. Nonetheless, it was still an AOU area bird, a state bird, a North American bird, and a Kings County bird. That’s worth a few hours in the cold.