German ringed Black-headed Gulls

I walked across the road to Orrell Water Park this afternoon to see if the regular German ringed Black-headed Gull had returned for a 6th winter. There were about 50 Black-headed Gulls waiting on the edge of the lake by the car park so I threw them some bread to bring them closer and I soon spotted one with a ring. I managed to get some photographs of it in the melee of feeding gulls and on checking them on the back of the camera I could see it was regular wintering bird that has been recorded more than 60 times over the last 5 winters.

IA141745    Black-headed Gull (ringed as an adult male)

Ringed              29/04/2012  Bohmke und Werder, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany.

Photographed   02/10/2017 Orrell Water Park, Orrell, Greater Manchester. 1102 km W.

I soon noticed there was another ringed Black-headed Gull but it kept weaving between the other gulls and was a bit more difficult to photograph. I must have taken around 100 photographs before I thought I had secured the full ring number and address on the ring. On returning home I reviewed the photos on the laptop and was able to work out the full ring number and it was a German ring from the Heligoland ringing scheme (ring address Helgoland, Germania).

I have submitted the details of the ring number to BTO and hopefully I will get the ringing information back fairly quickly but it can take several months when a foreign ringing scheme is involved. When I do get the details back I will post them on the blog.