Over the last two years I've got more into looking for gull colour-rings, following in the footsteps of the fascinating reports from Sam Baxter at the Nevern. In fact I tend to look at gulls legs first, and then the rest of them...!
With regards to Great Black-backed Gulls, I regularly encounter birds from Skokholm (red - for example recorded 7 today), a couple of times from Gwynedd (green) and once from the Bristol Channel (yellow). On 23rd November I had one with a black ring on the Gann lagoon, which I read as J:515. It appeared from cr-birding.org that it was from South Norway, but I couldn't find an exact match. Luckily, I picked up the bird again today, and realised it was actually JJ:515 - the benefit of a bird stood on the mud, not in water!
I could track the bird easily via cr-birding, and now know that it was a bird ringed as a nestling on 10th July 2016 at Hamnaholmen, Sandsøya, Sande, Møre og Romsdal, Norway. It was recorded on the Ythan Estuary in Scotland in September that year (a straight line movement of 688km SW), and 5 times in Norway since: 3 times at its natal site, and twice no more than 10km away. It was then recorded in Lothian (845km from its original colony) on 21st September, before rocking up the Gann last week. It is currently some 1,332km from 'home'...
JJ:515 on the lagoon on 23 November (you can see how easily I missed the first J..)
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| JJ:515 today |