November 8th, 2020 
Nick 
On 16th October 2020 I enjoyed a nice birding day at Minsmere and Southwold with David Scott. Although the day had not turned up any rarities we saw a wide variety of nice birds including big groups of Redwings feeding on berries, Coal Tits on the feeders, a Mediterranean Gull on the scrape, a male Eider in flight out to sea, lots of Brent Geese flying overhead, large numbers of Goldcrests in low bushes and great views of a few Dartford Warblers. We finished the day at Southwold Harbour with a nice Purple Sandpiper and a first winter Caspian Gull but as we were leaving to go back to the hotel we noticed a first winter Herring Gull that had a colour leg ring on it. I stopped the car and took a couple of quick photos so that I could report the bird to the relevant person.
As can be seen in the photo this young Herring Gull has a red leg ring on the left leg and a metal ring on the right leg. Metal rings are really hard to read so I focussed on the colour ring which is designed to be read in the field.
The code was easily read through binoculars as we were so close to this gull, but I took a close-up photo just to confirm it.
By searching on the European Colour Ring Birding website I was able to enter the species and ring colour to narrow things down to several ringing projects. A little additional information supplied by the ringers on the website allowed me to narrow it down to one ringing project which turned out to be the same project that had recently supplied me with information on an Avocet I reported around a week previously – Pied Avocet with Colour Rings.
Considering that this Herring Gull was a first winter bird it was obvious that it would have been ringed earlier in this same year and it turned out to have been first ringed on 6th July 2020 at The Port of Felixstowe. However, it had also been reported by other observers at Southwold Harbour on 5th, 8th, 9th and 14th October, including by someone I know! This young gull had obviously found somewhere it liked, I wonder if it spending the whole winter there? Look out for this bird if you happen to be in the Southwold area.
Order Gulls of Europe T-Shirt in your size
I designed this t-shirt containing some of Britain and Europe’s regularly seen gull species. This much-maligned group of birds do not get much attention on gifts and clothing for birders so I decided to create this t-shirt which features Little Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Black-legged Kittiwake, Great Black-backed Gull, Common Gull, Mediterranean Gull, Herring Gull, Brown-headed Gull and Caspian Gull.
These species and Yellow-legged Gull also appear on a coffee mug design here – Gulls of Britain and Europe Coffee Mug.
A book for gull-lovers is – The Gull Next Door. The link takes you to my review of this nicely-written book in which the author’s passion for gulls really comes across.
Posted in 
Tags: 
