👉 Okay, let’s tackle this… elusive… thing called, um… "…
cough
… cmn¹.⁴."
Now, I gotta be upfront here. Frankly? Nobody outside a very specific and frankly rather paranoid corner of early 20th-century American ornithology actually knows exactly what it means! It's essentially the stuff of a fantastic urban legend—a weird footnote in the grand, slightly embarrassing, saga of early banding efforts for… gosh darn near every kind of gull. Here’s how we generally piece things together: During the late 1800 and early 1900, ornithologists were desperately trying to figure out exactly what was going on with the migratory habits of various gull species along the Atlantic Flyway. They began banding these birds – slapping numbered bands on their legs—and diligently recording where they caught them, then re-sighted them. But... in a spectacularly haphazard and frankly, rather unscientific way. The thing about this early banding was that people were just… throwing everything into the hopper. You got your dates, you got the sighting locations, but the band numbers were sometimes misread by sleepy, underpaid clerks. And the notation, for some, a really weird, almost fevered insistence of trying to capture every single detail , led to some absolutely bonkers abbreviations and numerical designations! So, here's what we reckon that "… 1,4…" probably
