Most bird watchers have an opinion on ringing/banding regimes and not everyone views this practice positively. Whether or not you think that ringing should be done to the degree that it is, the only way that there can be any meaningful things to be learned from it is if birders report sightings of ringed birds. Few birders make a point of actively looking for birds with reportable rings on them but even without looking for them, sometimes birds just turn up in front of you with obvious colour rings that can be read and reported. On 27th June 2018 I spent an hour at the seafront at Leysdown in Kent, UK, photographing gulls, particularly some very smart adult Mediterranean Gulls and, although I did not notice it at the time, one of the photographs reveals an easily read colour ring on one individual’s right leg.

It was when viewing the above photo that I noticed the green colour ring with white script on it and when I zoomed in on it, by a happy piece of luck, the code is lined up perfectly to be read from this view.

Very clearly the code is R08E, white on green. With this information I referred to the European Colour Ring Birding website to find the contact email for the person in charge of the ringing program responsible for applying this ring. This website is a great tool for anyone wanting to report a ringed bird and I was lucky enough to get a reply from France less than an hour after reporting the bird. There have been many reports of this individual since it was ringed in northern France in 2009, almost all of them in France itself but my sighting at Lesdown was the third time it has been reported from this site and every time it has been in June. It seems that this French Mediterranean Gull likes to visit Leysdown in Kent for its summer holidays! This pattern probably represents post-breeding dispersal and we know that many gulls head to England from Europe after breeding.

I would encourage other birders to look out for ringed birds and to make an effort to read and report them using the European Colour Ring Birding website to find who to report the sighting to. In this way we can all do a bit to make sure that ringing programs receive recovery records and that the effort has not been a waste of time.

For those who are interested in this topic I have several other posts that are similar;

• Ringed Black-headed Gull – British Birding
• A Ringed Herring Gull – British Birding
• Reporting Ringed Birds – British Birding