Greyscale Gulls
ResearchA gull is not one bird. It is eight.
A course and an identifier for the hardest common birds in Europe. The project is still at the research stage: the data model, the Western Palearctic species list and the course structure exist. The app does not — what exists is an understanding of what it has to be.
The key decision
The teaching unit is the plumage stage, not the species
A four-year gull passes through eight or nine distinctly different looks: juvenile plumage, four cycles, each with a breeding and a non-breeding variant. Two birds of the same species can share nothing visually, while birds of different species look like twins.
Hence the decision: the atom of both the course and the identifier is species × age × season, not species. That is precisely why a naive photo-to-species model falls apart on gulls, and precisely why a course and a good identifier converge on the same schema: a graph of plumage stages that the course walks in order of difficulty and the identifier queries with a geography and season prior.
Progression
Five levels, from “is it a gull?” to rarities
- 0
Is it even a gull?
Gull against tern and the other waterbirds. The French mouette / goéland split is about size and genus, not taxonomy. And goodbye to the mythical “seagull”.
- 1
Your five
The expert move: narrow the list to the species actually expected at your spot in this season — and learn their adults cold, summer and winter.
- 2
Age before species
The foundational skill: assign an age class before naming the bird. Two-, three- and four-year cycles; one species, many looks.
- 3
Large white-headed gulls
The hard complex: Herring, Yellow-legged, Caspian, Lesser Black-backed, Great Black-backed. Structure over plumage; immatures, where most identifications collapse.
- 4
Larophile
Rarities, hybrids, sun-bleaching, aberrant moult, the white-wingers. Picking the odd bird out of a flock and documenting the find properly.
Level 3 is what the course exists for: the mass-market identifiers do not take a learner that far.
Status
What exists and what is missing
Done: a list of 29 Western Palearctic species with difficulty tiers, multilingual names and cycle length; a schema for plumage stages and features; a method for scoring mantle grey; a draft of the course; and an audit of which images may legally be used at all.
Missing is the expensive part — verified reference photographs for every stage, with a clean licence and a confirmed identification. That is where this project is blocked by something other than code.