Although birding is a relaxing hobby that takes birders to lots of interesting and often beautiful places I also find it rewarding to be able to contribute towards a greater understanding of birds which can provide information useful in their conservation. One of the easiest ways I have found of doing this is by reporting ringed birds whenever I am able to find them and read the colour markings or codes on them. When I made a visit to Beddington Farmlands on 2nd Novemer 2020 my main objective was to see the long-staying White Stork that was there (check out my video on it here – White Stork in London) but with large numbers of gulls to search through I was not only able to find an interesting variety of species but two different colour-ringed gulls, a Black-headed Gull and a Lesser Black-backed Gull, to add a different type of interest to a nice day of birding.

Over the last few months I have recorded a number of colour-ringed gulls but most of them haven’t had a very interesting travel history, with little movement; this seems particularly true for Herring Gulls. However, at Beddington I photographed one Black-headed Gull with a yellow colour ring that turned out to have a slightly more interesting route of travel, having seemingly taken a holiday to The Netherlands in 2016. Check out its history here – Recovery Map for Black-headed Gull 2PNP.

The second bird I noticed wearing a colour ring was an adult Lesser Black-backed Gull. At first it was quite distant and my photos did not reveal the alphanumeric code but fortunately it moved and came closer allowing me to get a photograph in which I could read the code, TJ6T on an red ring.

This gull has a far more interesting travel history with lots of reports of it, making regular visits to Netherlands, Germany and Beddington over a number of years. Take a look at this map for the details, they are quite interesting – Recovery Map for Lesser Black-backed Gull TJ6T. This gull was originally ringed as an adult (5 years old or more) in March 2010, so it was at least 15 years old when I saw it.

As usual I used the European Colur-Ring Birding website to track down the ringing program responsible for these gulls and as is so often the case they had both been ringed by the North Thames Gull Group. It seems that a very high proportion of the gulls that are colour-ringed in UK have been ringed on one of a couple of landfill sites in Essex, SE England. Maybe my next colour-ringed gulls will have come from somewhere further afield.