Sabine’s Gulls breed patchily across the Canadian Arctic, but are most common in the Eastern Arctic. Population monitoring programs from the west and north coasts of Alaska suggest weakly positive trajectories for those populations from the late 1980s/early 1990s to 2016/2017 (Swaim 2017, Wilson et al. 2018). There are few data available for the Canadian population. In the 1980s, during aerial surveys in the Foxe Basin, Nunavut, the species was recorded as being abundant along western Baffin Island and across Prince Charles and Air Force Islands (Gaston et al. 1986). Surveys of Prince Charles and Air Force Islands in 1996 and 1997 confirmed that they remained abundant there (Johnston and Pepper 2009). Aerial surveys of the Foxe Basin in 2002-2003 documented much lower densities of Sabine’s Gulls along western Baffin Island, moderate densities at Prince Charles and Air Force Islands, and high densities in the Spicer Islands (K. Dickson, Environment and Climate Change Canada, unpublished data), where they were not recorded in the 1980s (Gaston et al. 1986). Limited surveys in the Queens Channel region, Nunavut, suggest increases between 2002 and 2012 (Maftei et al. 2015). These observations suggest that the distribution and abundance of Sabine’s Gulls may have increased over time, but do not provide an adequate basis for an assessment of national population status relative to about 1970. As such, a national population goal for the Sabine’s Gull has not yet been determined.
