Natural Selection

Picture by Isabelle Rosen

I was Run Director at Blackpool parkrun on Saturday. Although it had been frosty overnight we were still able to go ahead. But the ice on the lake gave an ideal opportunity to get more gull ring numbers than usual. I had about thirteen locals before they were spooked by something, and I went home.

It’s a while since I’ve had a foreign ringed Black-headed Gull here. In the past I’ve seen birds from Norway, Denmark and one from Lithuania whose preferred winter site was actually a Blackpool car park. So it was nice to see a white Darvic ringed bird, the code J1900 making it Norwegian.

The colour ringers in different countries have varying systems, and even varying levels of interest in sending back life histories. Norway have a gold plated service where you get instant life histories back. Except J1900 produced a blank result when input.

I contacted the Norwegian ringing centre, and they agreed that the code was correctly read from my phone scoped image and undertook to look into it. Earlier in the week Kane Brides contacted to me explaining what had happened. He has access to Norwegian Darvic rings, and had replaced J0161 with J1900 last year. This had fallen through the gaps at the time.

Photo by Kane Brides

Here is the life history which was finally confirmed today. I say finally, but the mystery was resolved inside a week so it’s not that long. It’s great to be able to see pictures of the same bird taken in different seasons in different years in a different country.