BHGNI on Kickstarter!

As funding for conservation projects is hard to come by at the minute, we've launched a Kickstarter to try and raise some funds to buy colour-rings for the 2015 season. Please like, share and most of all, feel free to pledge

If you don't know what Kickstarter is, read on....

Kickstarter is full of projects, big and small, that are brought to life through the direct support of people like you.

If people like a project, they can pledge money to make it happen.

Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing — projects must reach their funding goals to receive any money.

We have set a funding goal of £350 which will allow us to double the dataset of our project in 2015 and if you would like to support it, please visit the link below and help out.

All the money raised will go directly to the NI BHG project and if we raise more than the funding goal, all the better, it means more birds will be included in our project!

Thank you!!

PLEDGE TO HELP BHGNI REACH THEIR FUNDING GOAL BY CLICKING HERE!

Herring Gull - Yellow 0V:W

Two colour-ringed gulls were photographed at Ballycarry, Larne Lough yesterday and posted on the NIBA blog (see here), one of "my" Black-headed Gulls and a Herring Gull sporting a yellow ring with the inscription 0V:W

Photo by Cameron Moore

Checking the cr-birding.org website, a report of the sighting was sent to Lee Barber. It turns out however, that while it is part of a project registered to Lee in England, the Herring Gull was actually ringed on the Copeland Islands earlier this year.

I felt a bit of an idiot at this point, as the re-sightings co-ordinator for the Copeland colour-ringed gulls is yours truly! Oops. I don't know why I didn't check our database first.

Anyway, this is the first re-sighting of it since. In fact, this is the first re-sighting of any of our birds from Copeland, so we're delighted!

A total of 16 Herring Gulls were colour-ringed in May in the first year of what is an extension to a project already ongoing in mainland UK.

Anyone attending the BTO Conference at Oxford Island tomorrow will hear presentations on both these projects during the afternoon session.

Photo by Cameron Moore

Many thanks to Cameron Moore for reporting his sightings and the photos and to Lee for keeping me right!

First birds of winter 2014/15 cr-ringed

Yesterday Scott, Ru and I headed to the southern shores of Lough Neagh to take advantage of the mild autumnal weather and do some birding.

We called into Kinnego Marina near Oxford Island to check for colour-ringed Black-headed Gulls as there's normally a sizeable flock hanging around. The birds were "bitey", so I decided to give catching a go.

In the short time we were there I caught four birds, three adults and a first winter. The first birds added to the project in winter 2014/15.

Only two of the three adults could be colour-ringed as one of them was missing a leg.

 

I've seen black-headed gulls with only one leg before, but I always assumed there would be some sort of stump. This bird however had nothing where it's left leg should've been. It obviously doesn't hinder the bird as it has managed to survive until adulthood, making it at least 2+ years old.

The highlight of our small catch was, without doubt, this control which was sporting a Latvian metal ring.

 

This is the first Black-headed Gull from Latvia we've recorded in NI since the project began in November 2012, yet another country added to the list of where our wintering birds are from.

Great start to the season, I hope the rest of the year is as successful!

Gull cr-ring reading in Oslo

At the end of last month I headed to Norway with a couple of mates for a week of birding and exploring around Varanger. We had an overnight stop-off in Oslo waiting for our flight north, so we headed into the city for a look around.

Being birders, we were automatically drawn to the seafront and my eye was immediately drawn to the gulls gathered near the opera house. I noticed a couple of the birds were colour-ringed and within 10 minutes we had read five gull colour-rings.

After a walk to the Botanic Gardens, we saw another colour-ringed gull and a colour-ringed Mute Swan at Vaterland.

I reported all of our sightings via the ringmerking.no website and received the birds' histories instantaneously, a fantastic set up.

As part of our trip to Varanger, we visited Vardo - the home of Gullfest.

The iconic image of the Steller's Eider at Vardo harbour

 

It's not difficult to see why the world's most northerly bird festival is held here, the harbour was packed with thousands of gulls, a truly magnificent sight for any gull lover.

 

 



Birding in Vardo!

 

We spent a superb week in Arctic Norway and I would highly recommend a visit to Varanger, it's an absolutely brilliant place and we will definitely be back...hopefully the guys at Biotope will want to hear all about a Black-headed Gull study from Northern Ireland for Gullfest 2016!

Of the 24 WTE we saw in Varanger this was definitely the best view!

 

Sunrise

P.S. Does anyone else think this post was just an excuse for me to post some nice holiday snaps?!