Abstract

On 7th August 2022, a Kelp Gull Larus dominicanus was discovered at Grafham Water, Cambridgeshire. It subsequently became apparent that the bird had been present since 1st August. Details of the primaries aged the bird as a 3CY (‘second-summer’). It was considered not possible to assign the bird to subspecies. The record was accepted as the first Kelp Gull for Britain.IntroductionGrafham Water, Cambridgeshire, is a large, 630-ha reservoir some 70 km from the nearest coast. My first visit was as a teen in 1984, when I was delighted by a chance encounter with my first-ever Osprey Pandion haliaetus. During the 1990s, I developed a deeper interest in the birds that flock to Cambridgeshire – such as redpolls, wagtails, ducks and gulls – with the last being particularly obvious locally and, consequently, subject to much scrutiny. I continued to make intermittent visits to Grafham Water, often with the gull roost in mind and, when I moved nearby in 2011, I started to visit more regularly. By 2022, it had become my main local patch and I now try to visit several times a week.On 31st July 2022, I took a stroll along the dam at Grafham Water and was pleasantly surprised by the number of gulls present. Together with Matthew Rodgers (MR), we set a new site-record count of four Caspian GullsLarus cachinnans (soon to be repeatedly exceeded) and recorded the continuing presence of a colour-ringed Caspian x Herring Gull L. cachinnans x argentatus.