The gulls are back in numbers!

As some may have seen in my blog, my interest of gulls have increased during my stay in Longyearbyen. At first I thought of gulls as just another difficult group of birds to distinguish species in, but now when I have learned how to separate out many of the different species I have gotten very fond of them!

I started ringing Glaucous Gulls (Polarmåke) last year, and have taken over the responsibility of making sure that the reports of the gulls ringed in the last cr-project in Longyearbyen are ebing reported properly. Due to these two things I am reading cr-ringed gulls and catcjing gulls as much as I can. Due to a lot to do at work and with other projects I have not managed to start catching gulls yet this year, but I have read about 15 different cr-rings this year, where some of them havent been seen since they were ringed in 2007 and 2008. Also I have read four of my own birds from last year. On thursday I fed teh trap-site with 12 kgs of out-of-date chicken wings, amd within a few hours everything was gone. At the time there were only between 30 and 40 gulls there, but at Saturday I fed the gulls with approx 45 kg of fish-remains, and when I came back to see if the gulls wanted to feed o it, a flock of between 100 and 120 Glaucous Gulls were sitting around the feed. They had removed almost everything I had put out for them! This is looking promising for when I get the time to start trapping them to put on some new rings.