© Amar AyyashAn adult ivory gull, pure white with yellow tip on black bill, sits in the parking lot at the Lake County Fairgrounds on Jan. 3, 2018.
If anyone deserves to find an ivory gull at the Lake County Fairgrounds in Grayslake, it's Amar Ayyash.
Known throughout the nation as a gull expert and the administrator of the North American Gulls Facebook page, Ayyash of Orland Park has found plenty of rare gulls for birders to look at.
Still, Ayyash said it was pure luck that he discovered on a bitterly cold January day a very rare, small, all-white gull that flew into the parking lot and landed next to his car near several other much more common gull species called herring gulls.
Ivory gulls nest in Russia, Greenland and Canada, and, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
spend winter on icy waters north of Newfoundland. The gull's population is estimated to be at the most 27,000 individuals in the world, according to Birdlife International.
"It's a dream bird," said Ayyash. "It's one of the holy grails. There are not a lot of people who get the chance to find their own ivory gull in the lower 48 states."
Comment: The climate is certainly changing, it's getting colder and weather events are becoming much more intense, but it has nothing to do with the global warming lie and this is becoming clear for all to see, even Al Gore has had to change his tune: Al Gore's Global Warming: 'Bitter cold' is 'exactly what we should expect from the' err 'climate crisis'
The planet experiences periods of cyclical cooling and other more dramatic changes driven by much more massive influences than cow farts and old cars, see: