Pagophila eburnea
In 3 days ~30% in a week ~60%
The ivory gull (Pagophila eburnea) is a small gull, the only species in the genus Pagophila. It is a resident breeding bird in the high Arctic and has a circumpolar distribution through Greenland, northernmost North America, and Eurasia.
The ivory gull was initially described by Constantine Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave in 1774 as Larus eburneus from a specimen collected on Spitsbergen during his 1773 expedition towards the North Pole. Johann Jakob Kaup later noted the unique traits of the ivory gull and gave it a monotypic genus Pagophila in 1829. Johan Ernst Gunnerus later gave the species a new specific name, Pagophila alba. The genus name Pagophila is from Ancient Greek pagos, "sea-ice", and philos, "-loving", and specific eburnea is Latin for "ivory-coloured", from ebur, "ivory". Today only a few authors consider the ivory gull not deserving of its monotypic genus, instead choosing to merge it, along with the other monotypic gulls, back into Larus. However, most authors have not chosen to do so. The ivory gull has no subspecies. No fossil members of this genus are known.
This gull has traditionally been believed to be most closely related to either the kittiwakes,... Wikipedia →
Call0:26
Norway · 2014
© Claire Mazard · XC284132 · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
| # | Park | Country | Daily sighting probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Svalbard | 🇳🇴 Norway |
More parks will be added in future updates.
With luck
About 10% of wildlife watchers report an Ivory Gull sighting in Svalbard on a given day, based on 235 verified sightings from GBIF citizen-science data from 2019 to 2026. It is the 23rd most-seen of the 48 birds we can rate there. Over three days the chance rises to about 30%, and over a week to about 60%, if each day is a fresh chance.
July
In that month about 20% of wildlife watchers report an Ivory Gull in Svalbard on a given day, against under 5% in May, the lowest month. November to January have too few records to rate.
Between 9 am and noon
Across all the parks we cover, that three-hour window holds the most Ivory Gull sightings with a recorded time, and about 8 in 10 of them come between 6 am and 6 pm: it is a daytime animal.
Only Svalbard, in our data
Svalbard is the only park on Wallace's Line with enough records to rate Ivory Gull sightings: about 10% of wildlife watchers there report one on a given day.
Same family: Laridae
The closest relatives of the Ivory Gull that you can see in Svalbard (family Laridae, Gulls, Terns, and Skimmers) are Glaucous Gull (about 90%), Black-legged Kittiwake (about 90%) and Arctic Tern (about 90%), with each one's daily chance of a sighting.
GBIF citizen-science records
It is estimated from how often the Ivory Gull is recorded against all the birds logged in Svalbard (235 verified sightings from 2019 to 2026), calibrated against known sighting rates. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10% because citizen-science data supports honest approximations, not decimals, and months with records from fewer than five people show "—". How it works.
