strange species of bird while trawling the local sewer ponds. Upon seeing this bird, he contacted the Broome Bird Observatory by telephone to verify the species, however there was conjecture regarding its identity. Kane took photos of the bird and recorded field notes, before sending this information to the Appraisals Committee in Hobart, Tasmania, who were able to confirm that it was indeed a black-headed gull. This was the first recorded sighting of the species in Australia. In popular culture In Richard Adams' 1972 novel Watership Down, a black-headed gull named Kehaar (who claims his name is the onomatopoeia of waves breaking against the shore) plays a major part in the story. Injured by a farm cat and left behind during the seasonal migrations, Kehaar finds himself stranded on the Downs and is taken in by a warren of European rabbits. He later becomes their friend and ally, and helps to save the rabbits from danger many times; instincts eventually force him to return to his colony, but he promises to visit the rabbits each winter. True to Adams' stated intentions of trying to keep the animals' behavior close to reality, Kehaar is characterized as intelligent, gregarious, noisy, messy, and impatient. He has a guttural accent, inspired by a Norwegian Resistance fighter Adams once had known. Kehaar appears in all three screen adaptations of the novel; the character was voiced by Zero Mostel in the 1978 film, Rik Mayall in the 1999 TV series, and Peter Capaldi in the 2018 miniseries. The black-headed gull is the official bird of Tokyo, Japan, and the Yurikamome automated guideway transit in Tokyo Bay is named after it. Gallery References External links Black-headed gull stamps from many countries at bird-stamps.org Ageing and sexing (PDF; 2.0 MB) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta & Gerd-Michael Heinze Feathers of Black-headed Gull (Larus ridibundus) at Ornithos.de Article with video about Black-Headed Gull at avibirds.com black-headed gull black-headed gull Birds of Africa Birds of Japan Holarctic birds Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus Taxobox binomials not recognized by IUCN