Welsh Stormies and Falmouth gulls

It's been a while since I've got round to blogging, but then it seems of late we've just been looking at colour-ringed gulls and not much else! But we did receive some interesting reports from BTO recently, involving Storm Petrels recaught at Skokholm Island in south Wales earlier in the year.

The Bird Observatory recaught no fewer than 11 birds ringed by us, including four on just one night (22nd July, when 142 were caught on the island). Of these 11, six had been ringed in 2015 and 2017 at Hot Point, Lizard, with the other six all ringed on 15th July at Gwennap Head, Porthgwarra. This further highlights the link between sites in the English Channel and Irish Sea.

As part of a PhD application for one group member we've also been looking at some of our gull data from Falmouth, so thought we'd share. So across all of our gull sites we've colour-ringed 276 birds, including 199 chicks. Just in Falmouth the figure is 140 birds colour-ringed, of which 85 were chicks. These Falmouth birds have then generated 509 sightings, with 63 of the 140 being seen at least once after ringing. Some of these have only been seen once, but our most reported bird has been seen 60 times now.

Number of resightings of individual birds colour-ringed in Falmouth

Obviously the more sightings we receive the better we understand their behaviours and movements, so if you are a local birder then please keep an eye out for our blue-ringed birds.