Franklin's Gull

About the Franklin's Gull

The Franklin's Gull is the prairie's gull -- it nests in the marshes of the northern Great Plains, follows the plow for grasshoppers and earthworms, and twice a year pours through Texas in flocks that can darken a reservoir. Spring adults are genuinely beautiful: trim black hood, white eye-crescents, and a breast washed in pink like the inside of a shell.

The pink is real, not a trick of light -- a diet-derived blush unique among our gulls that fades on museum skins, so early ornithologists thought collectors were exaggerating. Fall and winter birds trade the full hood for a half-hood smudge, but keep the neat white crescents that separate them from Laughing Gulls.

Nearly the entire world population migrates through the middle of the continent to winter along the Pacific coast of South America, so Texas sits on the flyway's main street. On the Highland Lakes they pass in waves; these photos come from a late-November 2025 movement over Lake Travis at Windy Point.

Migration flocks rarely linger, so shoot the day you see them. A low sun on a spring flock brings up the pink -- the detail that makes a Franklin's portrait unmistakably a Franklin's.