Just back from spending the weekend in Ireland with Chris Bridge. Mostly a birding trip as Chris wanted to search for Forsters Tern and Ring-Billed Gull around Galway. You can read a report on Chris' blog which should be uploaded in the next few days.
So Friday morning found us in Galway City harbour and after seeing the above birds, we happened to bump into a nice chap called Michael Davis. Michael was taking photos of Black Headed Gull rings and as we helped him to read an Icelandic ring (575839) he invited us to have a look in a big ring bind folder that he had. This was full of A4 paper, each with the heading of a different country and listed beneath were the ringing information for all the gull rings he'd read. To name a few, he'd read rings from - Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Belgium as well as UK ringed birds.
He flicked through to the ''Iceland'' page and was able to tell us that 575839 was ringed on 26/06/2007 at Breidabolstadir and first seen in Galway on 15/10/2007. Amongst the ringing information on this page were familiar Icelandic names such as Sverrir Thortensen and Olafur Torfason!!
<1415km>
Before leaving Galway on Saturday we had another go at ring reading and managed to read EL59494 (UK). This bird was ringed on 14/6/2005 at Kingsbury Water Park,Warwickshire.
<500km>
Next we were off to Dublin to join in, in the Trad Fest celebrations.......and the morning after, with sore heads we dragged ourselves to Phoniex Park and read a Black Headed Gull darvic ring - Yellow 228G. Thanks to Chris Benson for the ringing information on this bird, it was ringed as a pullus on 02/06/2009 at Lough Mask in County Mayo and ours was the first sighting since then.
<130km>
No comments:
Post a Comment