A Herring-like Gull with yellow legs in NYC

On Nov 26th 2004 Pete Shen found a large gull with yellow legs at the north end of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in New York City. Here are some of the photos that he took of the bird:

(it's the one on the right)

Unfortunately there are no flying shots of this bird.

Photos have only been cropped and resized for the web. Color correction and exposure correction have not been applied.

The belief around here is that this is a unusual adult basic plumage smithsonianus Herring Gull - albeit one with the yellowest legs any of us have ever seen - based on the dark markings on head and neck, eye-ring color, bill color, extent of white on the folded primaries.

This begs the question of just what proportion of these American ssp. Herring Gulls have legs of this color ?

We'd be very enthusiastic to hear comments etc on this bird. If you email me at pjeffrey@hotmail.com I'll forward all emails to Pete also. Many thanks.

Phil Jeffrey, NYC, Dec 2004.