Just spent an hour and a half up at Hoover Reservoir near the dam on this sunny afternoon. During that time maybe sixty gulls cycled in and out, half floating in the opening to the lagoon and half loafing out on the docks. After half an hour I finally saw a good candidate for the California gull reported yesterday, standing on the floating dock. *None* of the other gulls seen (herring and ring-billed) was in full alternate plumage. This one stood out at ~200 yards--even with the naked eye--as largely snow-white; the rest of the gulls were dingy by comparison. This bird was kind of lanky at both ends, with seemingly longer narrower folded wings and bill. Sure enough, when I got it into the scope a lot fell into place: clear adjacent patches of red and black (the black distally) on the lower mandible, with the crown, throat, nape all immaculate white, and the apparently dark eye. The legs were of an indeterminate color, pinkish on the feet, but a pea-soupy gray-green on the legs, unlike nearby herring gulls. It stood apart from the other gulls the whole time, and relocated a bit only once in an hour and half, till 2:45. Its mantle looked darkish to me under those conditions, but there was no other fully adult gull with which to compare it. Bright sunlight can accentuate dark/light contrasts. For the last half-hour of my observations I ambled down and walked out to the end of an adjacent dock, where I had a point-blank view from maybe 50 yards in a 60X Nikon scope. This bird was the only one in spotless high breeding feathers, unobscured. The black patch on the bill was larger than the red one (odd); very few other N Am gulls, such as black-tailed and Belcher's, have a tricolored bill as adults. The leg color was less pink and more yellow-gray than the herring gull standing next to it. In this light, the mantle looked perhaps a bit darker gray than we're used to seeing here in ring-bills and herrings, but nowhere near as dark as a lesser black-backed. There was no other gull nearby in the same state of molt, and this in itself suggested it might be something unusual, as different species from different regions often have different molt schedules. But when I focused on the eye, the iris was clearly cream-colored, with a black pupil. This seemed to be a killer. The light-colored iris, and the lack of any other adult gull to compare directly with its mantle shade in the given light conditions, make me doubt a firm ID for California for this bird. I heard others had reported a California earlier up the reservoir a couple of miles today, but unless I am mistaken about the ID criterion, this promising bird didn't pass the test, but I can't explain the discrepancies. The fact that the other seekers today have not publicly called this a California is another incentive for me to sit this one out... Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]