14th April

As the weather forecast had indeed forecast it rained pretty much the entire day, only stopping in the early evening; the sea was predictably fairly quiet first thing with a Black-throated Diver and 5 Red-throated Divers north.   There wasn’t too much through the rest of the day with the Garganey and Common Teal x Green-winged Teal hybrid still present, a Merlin, 2 Sparrowhawks including an adult male, 2 Chiffchaffs and a single Wheatear of note.

                The main feature of the day came late afternoon with a huge build-up of Gulls on Vågsvollvåien and in the fields at Skollevol including 600+ Lesser Black-backed Gulls; I managed to read 26 darvic rings just as the rain stopped.

- There was the usual selection of local breeding Herring Gulls with a couple that had taken brief jaunts down to Denmark but unsurprisingly the Lesser Black-backed Gull rings produced more interesting life histories with the best being;

J6ET – ringed as a chick in Mandal in 2006 and has shown great winter site fidelity being re-sighted on the same landfill site near Madrid for several years.
J4NE – ringed as a chick nearby in 2008 and again shows great winter site fidelity, re-visiting the same area in Portugal.
JP0P – ringed as a chick in Mandal in 2004 and spends its winters near Faro in Portugal but has also been seen on passage in The Netherlands and France where it has often spent several weeks before continuing south.
JAM7 – ringed as a chick in 2008 and has been seen on the same beach at Agadir in Morocco during the winter in 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2014 having returned to breed near here on Rauna every year since it came of age.

 There was one bird that broke the pattern as Herring Gull J2536, after being ringed as a chick locally in 2010 went and spent 2011-2013 in The Netherlands before returning here in summer 2013.  It then returned to the same site in The Netherlands in winter 2014 – a totally different strategy to the vast majority of other locally bred Herring Gulls which in general don’t travel very far at all.