Another sightings first

...and this time it was an 'at sea' record of one of our Kittiwakes; the first sighting of one of our birds away from our study sites. This excellent record came from group member Tony Blunden on a pelagic trip out of Penzance. Having photographed a bird off Longstones Lighthouse he thought might be ringed, zooming in produced a rather hazy image of one of our rings.

Now so far we've only ringed Kittiwakes with rings beginning A, C and P and those beginning P were ringed as chicks in 2012 or 2013, so that rules them out. So the ring must start C, which narrows it down to a small set of options. Most of these have horizontal bars or curly bits or such like, so the only real possibilities are CL and CT. Even just typing them here, you can see that the vertical bar of the two letters sits either close to or apart from the curl of the C. So with a judicious bit of photoshop-ery with similar unused rings, we're pretty sure this must be CT.

Well I think it's convincing... CT was ringed as a breeding adult at Trewavas Head in July 2013, 29km from where Tony was lucky enough to catch it in flight