Gullalicious

It’s been a few months since Danny kindly set up the GRG blog, so we thought it was about time that something was posted on it!



With the amazing snowfall we have had it has given us the opportunity to do some winter gull ringing – a GRG speciality. So far we have had reasonable success and a few failures, mainly due to the depth of snow. A total of 9 herring gulls, 5 black-headed gulls, 80 common gulls and 1 rook have been caught. Amongst these there have been a small number of interesting recoveries, some of which we have already found out ringing details.





The first ringing details we received were of a GRG bird that was ringed at Culterty field station in Newburgh by Paul Doyle on 30/6/1995 as a chick and captured on 2/1/2010 in the park outside Skitts’ house in Newburgh with two other birds. Nice to see an older bird and one that was reared in the region too.



Over in Westhill we have had the lion’s share of the success with 5 Herring gulls, 2 black-headed gulls, 78 common gulls and a rook caught in our wee garden with Tesco reduced counter bread. This has included an old GRG bird and a nice Norwegian ringed and colour-ringed bird. The GRG bird was ringed at the Don mouth on 25/2/2001. We were able to get the history of the Norwegian bird within a few hours on a Norwegian colour ringing website. The bird had been ringed as an adult male in Tromso on 23/4/2004, was sighted twice that June at the same site, again in June 2005, July 2007 and then nothing until it turned up in a catch of 27 gulls in the garden on 6/1/2010. The distance from Tromso to Westhill is 1727km and it was 2084 days since it was originally ringed!

Ewan & Jenny