Herring Gulls from further North

I have received three reports this month from The Netherlands (North Holland and then South Holland) of a Herring Gull colour ringed in Guernsey – White 8JA0. What is more...this same bird has previously been reported from Scotland in October 2014! These would be exceptional movements for a locally-reared bird. However, this gull was caught in November 2013, in its first winter, during one of our infrequent winter gull catches. It is still a very exciting series of movements, but the gull is most likely to originate from a colony much further north than Guernsey, which was wintering in the islands in 2013.

Herring Gull White 8JA0 at Mejendl Beach, South Holland (c) Vincent van der Spek

 

 

 

Lesser Black-backed Gulls from Northern Europe

When we began our intensive week-long colour ringing at Chouet Landfill each late May/early June we assumed that pretty much all the birds present at the landfill were local birds. We now know this to be far from the truth with many adult gulls being present which are not breeding, and with significant numbers of immature gulls from colonies further north still passing through the islands at that time.

In the past few weeks I’ve received reports of three such birds, all ringed as immatures in May at Chouet Landfill, and subsequently reported from The Netherlands (two) and Norway (one).

Without the colour ringing programmes we would never have known just how important Chouet landfill has been for migrating and dispersing gulls, as well as to those nesting locally.

Gulls over Chouet Landfill (c) PKV

 

The 2015 Seabird Season Gets Well Underway

2015 is a very important year for monitoring nesting seabirds in the Channel Islands, because this is Year One of the next British National Seabird Census. Most of our seabird colonies have not been accurately censused since the last national initiative in 2000!
Our earliest nesting seabirds are usually Great Cormorants, and this year is no exception. Our visits to the small colonies north of Herm and on the west coast of Guernsey resulted in counts of 36 and 16 active nests respectively...giving a total of 52 breeding pairs. There will be some birds to add to this Bailiwick total from Alderney, and possibly a few more from other tiny colonies. The nesting productivity seems up to par with recent years too.
In total 27 chicks were colour ringed on our first visit to the largest colony north of Herm.

The first seabird monitoring trip of 2015.



Seabird Cameras in the Channel Islands

This year we have a Seabird Camera operating on a European Shag nest on Jethou Island. At the moment the solar powered camera records an image every five minutes, but we are hoping to upgrade this to a live camera feed shortly.
There are also seabird cams on the Atlantic Puffins on Burhou, Alderney and hopefully there will soon be one on the Northern Gannet colonies off Alderney too.
Click below to see the details for all these cameras:-

http://www.birdsontheedge.org/2015/03/30/watch-channel-islands-seabirds-wherever-you-are/

Many thanks to Glyn Young and Birds on the Edge for this very helpful link and blog posting on BTE.



 

A recent image from the Shag Nest Camera (no eggs as of today!).