When a flock of seven Sabine’s gulls flew by the Massive Confusion Saturday, chaos ensued.
“So chaotic, everyone was screaming at the same time,” Amar Ayyash said. “We had 200 [other] gulls. These are smaller birds, so fast and nimble, it was obvious. They put down close to the boat and we were all looking at them.”
Sabine’s nest in the Arctic and are a rare sighting in Illinois, so rare that the eight Sabine’s they spotted will be an Illinois record. They also spotted one an hour and a half earlier before the flock of seven.
Though sightings of Sabine’s are rare in Illinois, Ayyash said September is the month to see one.
“But it more inland on reservoirs and big lakes,” he said. “Getting on a boat, you usually have low expectations.”
Ayyash and Steve Huggins were the guides for Pel’lake’gic Tour (word play on pelagic), part of the inaugural Urban Birding Festival out of Chicago. Ayyash, an expert on gulls, has “The Gull Guide: North America” (Princeton University Press), coming out in October. It will be the gull bible. Huggins, a top Chicago birder, guides for Red Hill Birding (redhillbirding.com).
They had 12 birders (mostly intermediate birders with a couple experts and a couple newbies) on the Massive Confusion, a 38-foot Delta, a commercially-built charter designed to take 14 people beside the captain and mate. Usually Capt. Bob Poteshman runs fishing trips on the Massive Confusion (Chicagofishingcharters.com) out of Montrose Harbor, this time it was birders he took out from 5:30-11:30 a.m. east of Montrose.
“They were nice people and they had incredible cameras,” Poteshman said.
He said they started seeing the better birds eight or nine miles out and the majority of the Sabine’s 11-14 miles out.
Ayyash said they saw probably more than 500 gulls. Most were the common ones for our area (herring and ring-billed), but, beside the Sabine’s, they also saw lesser and greater black-backed gulls. They also had two tern species, black and Forster’s, and 10 other species.
They did not see any Bonaparte’s gulls or jaegers.
“Not great diversity, but great for the gulls,” said Ayyash, a math teacher at Richards High School in Oak Lawn.
For the last 13-plus years, Ayyash has administered North American Gulls, a Facebook group with nearly 15,000 members. He said the sightings had birders from Wisconsin and Indiana excited.
“This is definitely putting this event on the map, I think,” Ayyash said.
The first Urban Birding Festival (theurbanbirdingfestival.org) was centered around Chicago with the hub at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Over three days (Friday to Sunday), there were dozens of guided tours and other events.
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