Most visitors don’t come to the Galápagos for the gulls. With more than a dozen kinds of Darwin’s finches on offer – along with fearsome frigatebirds, ethereal tropicbirds, and comical blue-footed boobies – my tour companions could be forgiven for overlooking these less glamorous seabirds.
But as a lifelong laridophile (as gull enthusiasts are known), I had two particular target species here. And on our first day’s sailing, as we landed on North Seymour Island, I saw my first: a large gull with a dark grey head and strikingly zigzag-patterned wings.
