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Ringed herring gull (1 Viewer)

leifvester

Well-known member
United Kingdom
Hey,

I saw a Herring gull today that had a difficult to read leg ring.

On the tarus (I think it was the left one, forgot to take a mental note), black ring with yellow characters.
The only character that was legible was the last character: '1'

I tried looking it up on cr-birding but no matches were coming up.

Are there any other databases I can look up?
 
Do you have any more info on the number of letters/numbers? Quite a few different ringing projects with black rings.View attachment 1617881
I was looking through that list and most were Black with White text, not yellow.

Also when I put '1' as the last letter, nothing showed up.

To be honest the code looked like gibberish, even though it was seen well enough (I was able to read a completely different smaller tag on a further away gull).
Maybe the '1' which was the only character I thought I was sure of was just worn.

I've since been informed that this tag was most likely to have been from the Isle of Man. Maybe the '1' I saw was the right hand side of an 'M' that had worn away.
 
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I was looking through that list and most were Black with White text, not yellow.

Also when I put '1' as the last letter, nothing showed up.

To be honest the code looked like gibberish, even though it was seen well enough (I was able to read a completely different smaller tag on a further away gull).
Maybe the '1' which was the only character I thought I was sure of was just warn.

I've since been informed that this tag was most likely to have been from the Isle of Man. Maybe the '1' I saw was the right hand side of an 'M' that had worn away.
Actually it's the orange tags that end in :M so can't have been that, but the colours are right for the black/yellow Herring gull tags:

It is strange though that I really thought the last character was a '1'. It was the only character I could read clearly at the time, but could definitely just have been a coincidence of wear. Not sure how robust gull leg tags are.
 
Peter Rock's gulls (Bristol Scheme) cohorts have 2 letters separated by a plus (+) or colon : but I don't know if he uses the letter I (which could easily look like the number 1). However, the British breeders don't tend to wander very far so without knowing where you saw your gull it might not be a helpful suggestion.

In my own experience white inscriptions can look distinctly yellowish with age (and at distance in the gloom!) and the angles at which you see the legs can affect how many of the characters can be read and whether you can differentiate between e.g. J and 1.

The rings do wear over time. When I used to read Med Gull rings one bird started with all four characters showing, which then became 3 and a half and then
just the first three characters. (and then the pig farm closed and the Med Gulls disappeared!)

In answer to your question
Are there any other databases I can look up?
not that I know of.

I sometimes ask on Log in to Facebook if all else fails.
 

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