Gulls, Leeds UK, 16th Jan 2022 (1 Viewer)

[stevethehydra]

1-3: Are any of these not Herring Gulls? And if not, why not?

4-7: I thought this was a good juxtaposition of a Common Gull and Herring Gull for comparison of structure and mantle shade (I don't tend to see these two sp. close together often - usually I see Common with Black-headed Gull if with any other species). Then the BHG came between them, and either this is a freakishly large Common Gull or a freakishly tiny Black-Headed! I don't think it's a zoom illusion, as to the naked eye the CG didn't seem more than a foot or so closer than the other two, and they were all around 100m away. There were other BHGs around, but they didn't come close enough for direct size comparison. Does this seem out of the ordinary to anyone else?

 

[Butty]

I'm sure the common gull is much more than 30 cm closer to you than the black-headed gull (and I suspect they're all a good deal closer than 100 m). But - be that the case or not - relative sizes and the interplay with distance in photos can appear very odd and be very confusing - for reasons that seem to make no sense. That's just how photos are.
For what it's worth, I don't find anything odd about the relative sizes as they appear in these photos - and I see no reason to think that these are all other than normal-sized individuals.