You have to take my word for it, but what you are seeing here is a SMALL part of a flock of over 1000 Franklin's Gulls seen at Britton Ford.

When I 1st saw a very densely-packed flock of dark birds on the water in the distance, I 1st thought it was the 1st big flock of Coots forming up. Finally a few birds took flight and settled back in, showing themselves to be Franklin's. This flock picked up en masse a couple of times to move a short distance, and was truly a memorable sight.

I tried to count the birds, but in some places they had to be 10-12 birds deep and right on top of each other. I wound up trying to count by 50's, and came up to just over 1000. I really think there was WELL over 1000 birds in this flock. This doesn't come close to the 3000+ Franklin's Jeff had last November along the Mississippi, but away from the Mighty Mississip, this is a pretty nice congregation.

Amazingly, before last year the TN hight count for a day was well under 100 birds, and before today I probably hadn't seen 100 in my life!