Birdwatch: Going to the Galápagos for the gulls

Most visitors don’t come to the Galápagos for the gulls. With more than a dozen kinds of Darwin’s finches on offer – along with fearsome frigatebirds, ethereal tropicbirds, and comical blue-footed boobies – my tour companions could be forgiven for overlooking these less glamorous seabirds. But as a lifelong laridophile (as gull enthusiasts are known), I had two particular target species here. And on our first day’s sailing, as we landed on North Seymour Island, I saw my first: a large gull with a dark grey head and strikingly zigzag-patterned wings. Swallow-tailed gulls are the only nocturnal member of their family, with huge, bug-like eyes enabling them to forage for food at night. Like all the wild creatures here, they were ludicrously tame, allowing me to take countless photographs. The archipelago’s other endemic gull has the unfortunate distinction of being the world’s rarest, so I wasn’t expecting to find it so easily. But as we strolled along the beach, accompanied by a cacophonous chorus of seabird calls, I noticed a smaller, darker bird flying towards us. A lava gull, named after its charcoal-grey plumage, which blends in perfectly with the volcanic rocks of its island home. Despite there being fewer than a thousand lava gulls in existence, the population remains stable, so the species is not yet threatened with extinction. Yet, like all the Galápagos Islands’ endemic birds, its survival remains in the balance in this rapidly changing world.