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| 1Y Mew Gull. Do not scream with food in your mouth |
When the weather forecast for the weekend said cloudy and rain showers we decided to go for a weekend catching 1Y gulls. Despite several interesting football matches in Premier League we choose gull catching (!) just following the matches on our mobile phones. Primarily we tried to achieve our goal of catching one hundred 1Y Mew Gulls before end of September, but if a Herring or Lesser Black-backed gull comes to close we will of course also grab these. Friday evening started will with six Mew Gulls and one Herring gull in just over one hour. Saturday was even better, but we only had a window of approximately two hours to easily get gulls. After the sun burst though the clouds and loads of people, dogs and children occupied the best places to catch. The gulls became more and more 'thick-necked' and less and less eager to come close to us. The day ended with seven Mew Gulls and two Herring Gulls. On Sunday we woke up to fully clouded sky and rain. This weather really make the gulls easy to catch and in the end of the day we had ringed 16 Mew Gulls and 2 Herring gulls.
We also did one interesting reading when we saw a 1Y Mew Gull we marked in an suburb area north of Bergen in the city centre of Byparken. The distance is only about 10 kilometres, but it is interesting to know that gull hatched in the suburbs make their way to the city centre to feed before migration starts. The marked increase of 1Y gulls in the city centre the last week may therefore be birds form the areas surrounding Bergen (both suburban breeders and 1Y's form breeders in natural habitat) and the urban gulls form the city centre.
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| J2R8 moving from the suburbs to the city centre of Bergen |
Our first 1Y weekend gave us these results:
| Species | 1Y | Sub adult |
| Mew Gull | 26 | 3 |
| Herring gull | 4 | 1 |
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| JN703, a big 1Y male Herring gull was one of our results this weekend |
Our total number of 1Y Mew gull is at the time of writing 39 individuals. This includes one ringed as pullus which later got plastic.
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