Saturday 15 September 2012

How we will monitor movements

As you may have already guessed from the name of the blog and previous post, the idea of this project is to colour-ring Black-headed Gulls.

Through fitting the gulls with coloured rings which have letters and numbers engraved on them, we will be able to track movements of specific birds through re-sightings and reports.

There are similar projects ongoing across Europe and birdwatchers who keep an eye out for colour-ringed gulls.  You just have to look at some of the links I have listed on the right of this blog to realise how popular gull ringing has become.

Each project is assigned a different combination of colour and codes, so when a colour-ringed Black-headed Gull is reported via www.ring.ac, the European coordinator for small gull colour-ringing will be able to pass the information on to the relevant project leads.

The NI Black-headed Gull Colour-ringing Project has been assigned orange rings with a black four alpha-numeric code, starting with number "2", e.g. 2AAA.  It is also important that the colour-ring is fitted to the bird's left leg.
I have already been contacted by observers in Sweden and Germany with reports of ringed birds.  Unfortunately though, these aren't from my project as I haven't started ringing yet!  The bird pictured was ringed in England and re-sighted in southern Sweden.

It would be fantastic to receieve reports from continental Europe of one of "my" birds in the future.  Fingers crossed!

Photo by Joakim Karlsson

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