T56W back for another winter at Whitehouse Lagoon

As part of my section of Belfast Lough which I monitor for the Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS), I am lucky enough to get to count at Whitehouse Lagoon and Dargan Bay. As I've touched on before, these areas can attract large numbers of birds and colour-ringed birds regularly turn up here.

This weekend, while out conducting my October WeBS count, in addition to counting several thousand birds, I managed to record two colour-ringed Black-headed Gulls, a colour-ringed Black-tailed Godwit and a colour-ringed Oystercatcher.

One of the Black-headed Gulls was a bird I had ringed as a chick on Blue Circle Island, Larne Lough in 2014 and hadn't been seen again, until Suzanne Belshaw reported it at Whitehouse in August this year.

The second bird was a Polish ringed bird, which I've reported on here before, T56W (see here).

Having been ringed as an adult at a breeding colony in western Poland in 2012, it hadn't been re-sighted until Stuarty McKee photographed it at Whitehouse Lagoon in January this year.

Photo by Stuarty McKee

Suzanne then recorded the bird back at Whitehouse in August, after it presumably returned to Poland for the breeding season and, more recently, Gareth saw it last week, before my sighting this week. It certainly looks to have settled in this area for the winter.

I will upload posts on the godwit and Oystercatcher in the next few days.