Over the years various members of the group and local birders have reported a wide variety of colour-ringed birds in the county. As we run a long-term urban gull project, not surprisingly our most-reported species is Herring Gull, but what about other species? A quick look at the numbers from the BTO's DemOn (Demography Online) database gives us records of over 4,500 colour ring reads of 26 different species, summarised by year here:
As expected, other gull species feature right at the top, followed by species that we run RAS (Retrapping Adults for Survival) projects on: Kittiwake, Jackdaw and House Sparrow. We don't ring any smaller gulls ourselves, so all of the records of Mediterranean and Black-headed Gull resightings come from other schemes, often abroad. In fact a lot of the larger gulls are from abroad as well, with French Great Black-backed Gulls topping the table, closely followed by Belgian and French Mediterranean Gulls.
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| Polish-ringed Black-headed Gull at Swanpool, Falmouth (Mark Grantham) |
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| French-ringed Great Black-backed Gull at Southerly Point, Lizard (Terry Thirlaway) |
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| Belgian-ringed Mediterranean Gull at Coverack (Mark Grantham) |
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| Irish-ringed Lesser Black-backed Gull on Copperhouse Creek, Hayle estuary (Mark Grantham) |
Lower down the list are some more unusual species, details of which we've blogged about before, including:
Some of the other more unusual resightings include these smart birds:
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| Green A61 was seen at Lizard Lighthouse in March 2018 before being seen back on Skokholm Island where it was ringed just nine days later (Terry Thirlaway) |
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| This Dutch-ringed Sanderling was a regular on Marazion beach in winter 2016-17 and also once in January 2018, but was also regularly seen on autumn passage in The Netherlands (Ben Porter) |
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| This Dutch-ringed Sandwich Tern at Sennen Cove had been seen three weeks previously in Tyne and Wear (Clive Richards) |
We're always keen to receive new sightings though and can help in tracing birds with the different coordinators, so if you're lucky enough to see any colour-ringed birds then drop us an email with details - westcornwallringinggroup@gmail.com
