Daneshill Landfill Site with NNRG, Monday 27 February

Due to the success of last week's gull cannon-netting session at Daneshill, it was decided to give it another go yesterday. Twelve of last weeks 14 returned, together with another eight folks! All the hi-viz apparel hurt the eyes. With the site sussed now we had had the cannons set by 9ish, and fired for the first catch around 11 and took about 150 small and 30 large gulls. These were processed by early afternoon and we got set to fire again, this time taking c150 gulls with big gulls forming a better percentage of the catch. Two of the Black-headed Gulls were Danish colour-ringed birds from the same project (which we've contacted for original ringing details). Most of the big gulls were immatures, so there was plenty of musing over ID & ageing with these complex taxa. There's also a write-up of the session here: http://www.davehallam.blogspot.com/2012/02/gulls-arent-vermin.html

Again most of the Black-headed Gulls had RED darvics fitted, all the Common Gulls ORANGE and the Great Black-backed Gulls YELLOW ones. Total catch for the day was: Black-headed Gull 280 new & 2 controls, Common Gull 6 new, Herring Gull 17, Greater Black-backed Gull 30.

Jim