Black-headed Gull, White V03S, ringed in Denmark in 2016 (Mike Watson).
BLACK-HEADED IS OFTEN THE COMMONEST BIRD IN RIBCHESTER in winter on my BTO BirdTrack counts. But where do they come from? Lee Parnell’s sighting in December 2020 of a bird colour-ringed in Zagreb, Croatia gave a clue that not all of them are from hereabouts. You could easily be forgiven for thinking they are, as Belmont Reservoir, home to the UK’s largest colony of them (11,500 pairs in 2020!), is only 15 miles away. So when Alexander I and saw a bird stood on the roof of his school on 1 March that bore a ring, White V03S, we were keen to find out where it had come from. Well it was a nice surprise to discover it was not a local breeding bird at all, in fact it was ringed as a chick at a colony on an island off the coast of Denmark, over 900km away! It was also interesting to discover that this is the first reported sighting of it since it was ringed in 2016, almost 5 years ago, on a tiny island of the Hirsholmene group off the northeast tip of Denmark. There are about 3,000 Black-headed Gulls on this island, which is also home to 1,000 Sandwich Terns and is a RAMSAR site.