Sligo's slippery slope to ringing

Mícheál Casey writes:

I started getting into ringing from reading the metal rings on gulls, particularly Common and Black-headed Gulls. Back in 2004, I read the ring of a handsome Common Gull, and was thrilled to hear back from Hugh Insley about where and when it was ringed. It was a chick (one of a brood of three) which was ringed on 26 May 1997 at Loch Tarff, near Fort Augustus, Highland, which was 400 km from where I saw it in Sligo Harbour, Ireland.

Common Gull. Photo by Mícheál Casey

I have seen this bird at least once every winter since 2004 and have just seen it back for its 20th year this weekend, looking quite fresh for its age.

Portfolio of this Common Gull. Photo by Mícheál Casey

I emailed Hugh when I decided to move on from ring-reading to training as a BTO ringer and I remember the reply well. He said it will add a lot to my birding, but it will also take away some of my enjoyment of birding, as my enjoyment of every bird or group of birds seen will be diluted by....."now how could I catch that?". He was partly right, but I have gained so much more than I have lost overall.

Common Gull. Photo by Mícheál Casey

This bird has a little way to go yet to break the longevity record of 27 years but hopefully it will keep returning to Sligo Harbour for a few more years to come; Mícheál will be waiting!

If you are able to read the ring of a gull while it's stealing your chips or just loafing around on the beach, please report it to www.ring.ac. You will be sent all the details on the bird and your record will help build a more complete picture of its movements.

Common Gull ringed when the Queen was 10 weeks old

Thanks to the Euring reporting website that non-ringers use to report ringed birds, we receive an average of 90 reports of BTO ringed birds per week. This number doesn't include recoveries by letter and ringers catching ringed birds of course. Most of the reports are of recently dead birds but there is a very small percentage of rings that have been found using metal detectors.

The ringing details of these birds take more time to find, as these birds have usually been dead for some time but well worth the effort. One report recently was of a ring that was found on 04 November 2012 at Green Ore, Wells, Somerset by John Durnell. As soon as we read that the ring also had Whitherby, High Holborn, London on the ring we realised how old this ring was.

Ringing in this country first started in 1909 but this ring was placed on a 1st year Common Gull on 3 July 1926 at Ard na Cailc, Dornoch Firth, Highlands! This was a distance of 738km in 31,537 days between ringing and finding (although the bird was dead for most of this). Amazingly ony 28 Common Gulls were ringed in 1926 compared with 716 last year.

Thanks to John Durnell for letting us know and for supplying the photos.

Kent Common Gull sets new longevity record

Derick Hiemstra and his 69-year-old father (below) are dedicated gull ringers in The Netherlands, ringing from their garage at Surhuisterveen. When they caught Common Gull EK42603 on 1st December, they noticed that the ring was rather worn, and as this was the first British-ringed Common Gull they'd caught, they were interested to know how old it was.

It turns out that EK42603 was ringed as a first-winter bird at Sandwich Bay (Kent) on 12th January 1985, making it almost 28 years old. This is a new longevity record for a UK Common Gull, beating the previous record of 25 years of an Irish bird.

Quite incredibly, Derick also held the European longevity record, resighting a Danish bird (5003247) almost 34 years after ringing!

But EK42603 now also has a shiny new colour ring (white E61K), so hopefully this isn't the last we'll hear of this OAG.

Check out more UK longevity records online here, and European records here.

Hola Common Gull!

Calum Campbell from Grampian Ringing Group writes:

After the continuing success of the large gull colour-ringing project in North-East Scotland, this summer Grampian Ringing Group undertook a new project to cover Black-headed and Common Gulls. One of the main aims of the project is to find out the dispersal and wintering patterns of the chicks from the various colonies in the region. On 30th June this year, we visited an inland colony of 2200 Common Gulls stretching over vast moorland (red pin).

Tillypronie colony - Euan Ferguson

There are very few colonies of such scale left in the UK after large declines in the breeding population. During the single ringing visit we ringed 180 chicks, 150 of which were also colour-ringed. Since ringing, six sightings have come in of Common Gull juveniles dispersing from this colony. Five of them were dotted around the North-East coast, valuable information, but we did get one sighting we did not expect.

Common Gull in Santa Crus de Oleiros - Antonio

A few days ago an email arrived from Sergio Paris, reporting that his friend Antonio had seen and photographed a Common Gull carrying an orange darvic (2XKN) in Santa Cruz de Oleiros, North-West SPAIN (green pin)!

According to the BTO recoveries database up until last year 94,916 Common Gulls had been ringed in the UK and Ireland. Only 1 of these had been recovered in Spain, a bird ringed in Kerry, Ireland in 1957 (blue pin)! Found only 7 miles from this one!


View Common Gull in Spain! in a larger map

This sighting is exceptional for the project and the ringing scheme but with only six sightings we are far from building a clear picture of where the majority of Grampian’s Common Gulls spend the winter. All sightings of all species of gulls are much appreciated and if you are not a ringer, sightings can be reported via ring.ac.