Is it common to sight Glaucous-winged Gull in U.K?

Question

I work in a town centre shop in a coastal town on the North Essex Coast (South East of England) I am used to the usual noise of the common (as i call them) seagulls looking for food etc. But yesterday morning about 7am. There was a really loud and feirce noice. from what sounded like a hundred seagulls!! i went outside to see what was going on. and to the left of me was a HUGE!! grey , seagull like bird. I look on the internet and have narrowed it down to the Glaucous-winged Gull. All the other "common" gulls were going crazy!! must have been a hundred watching it. 2 or 3 trying to attack it. but they were all sqwaking like mad. Is this a bird that has got lose some how. why would the other seagulls act so weird over one bird. it was kind off strange. but interesting!! any thought would be cool!!

Answer 1

The glaucous is a winter visitor.  Sure it wasn't a black-backed?  Any big gull will upset the resident population because of the threat it poses and they will mob it in an attempt to drive it away.  They'll do the same to any threat, even kestrels and the like.

Answer 2

Assuming you have not confused the name whilst giving the bird a 'visual' ID with the Glaucous Gull which is a different species entirely. Also assuming you have not mistaken the bird's identitiy either, some gull species look very similar and this is further complicated by the fact that certain gull species look different depending on which plummage year they are in. Still further gull hybrids are very common making classification and identity very difficult. All these points considered it is still possible that the bird you saw was indeed a glaucous winged gull as several sightings have been claimed and a few confirmed in and around the British Isles. Their usual distribution however could barely be further away, west coast of Alaska and some island areas off that coastline extending down the west coast of Canada and into the US as far as Florida. Although they are known to have visited other geographical areas.

Answer 3

It could have been a juvenile greater black backed gull - they don't have the dark back of the adults, but are the same size as the adults - absolutely massive.  Greater black-backed are the only common massive gull in the UK.

Definitely no glaucous winged gulls over here as stated in the previous answer, but glaucous gulls are present in very small numbers.  Young birds would be very pale, even white at one stage and the adult has no black tips to the wing feathers.

Here's a picture of a juvenile greater black-backed gull - the most likely culprit:

http://www.scholtz.org/bill/nature/Gulls...