Natural Selection

I spend rather too much time scanning through gulls flocks at Skippool for ringed birds these days. It has had its moments though, incIuding three Norwegian Common Gulls earlier in the spring which were the first I’d ever managed to read anywhere.

A couple of weeks back I was surprised that literally the first Lesser Black-backed Gull I saw was sporting a very pale looking Darvic. All the local birds these days have Green Darvics so this was immediately interesting.

I eventually tracked the bird through the scope and thought I had read it successfully as white W.M5H. I tried to get some confirmatory pictures as it walked through some shallows. This was the best I got:

So the last bit of the sequence was right, and I assumed the first part must be as well. My bad. Checking on the excellent https://cr-birding.org website showed no scheme with this combination of starting letter, punctuation and alpha-numerics.

I was advised to contact Peter Rock, as it turned out Peter had already had a heads up as I submitted the record to the BTO and he coordinates the large gull schemes for them. He asked me if I was certain before gently floating the possibility it was actually a Spanish bird N:M5H. In other words everything I hadn’t got in the picture was wrong.

Peter had copied in the putative ringer Jose Sanchez Cordero. Jose said that though it was hard to tell from the image of the ring the fact that the bird was the same age as N:M5H meant we had a match.

And this is where it gets really heart warming for me. Jose had blind copied in Monika who it transpired had been looking after this bird in care, where it had been ringed as it began to recover.

And here is the life history showing it was picked up unwell on a beach in Malaga, recuperating for a month before release then not being seen for over a year.

Presumably it was born somewhere in northwest England, and had made its way back when well enough to do so. A happy ending on the benefits of wildlife rehabilitation and ring reading.