News

TRIP - Pitsea - 28/01/2012: A great day. What looked like a difficult set turned out to be fine as there was little lorry movement and firing towards the road was not a problem. Two catches and the first in the bag for Dave Dutton. Very little of interest on the tip but the final total of 421 birds and 90 large gulls color ringed.28-Jan-2012


TRIP - Pitsea - 14/01/2012: The first session of 2012 was rather difficult. Birds were very jumpy and did not want to settle. Safety issues and a single Great Black-backed Gull caused problems once the air traffic had cleared and severl lifts of all the birds meant a frustrating couple of hours wait before a catch could be taken. Fantastic work by the compactor drivers also secured a catch and without their hard work we would have drawn our first blank. Final total of 276 was very good given the circumstances.14-Jan-2012


TRIP - Rainham - 17/12/2011: A fantastic way to end the year with a really nice catch of 260 birds of which again only 7 were Black-headed. We appear to have lost the ability to catch this species but with 129 large gulls colour ringed the value of the catch was fantastic. Mostly Herring Gulls and the wet conditions making a few birds a little dirty gave some interesing ID issues! However, KHD did well to pick out another Caspian much to the delight of BW. Two Yellow-legs and a nice sample of 25 Great Black-backs is an excellent total for Rainham. A really good team effort with a tricky shower in the middle of processing and again great work from the tip staff saw an excellent end to 2011.17-Dec-2011


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Aims

The aim of The North Thames Gull Group is to study the gulls making use of the landfill tips on the Essex coast of the Thames estuary, east of London.

We do this by catching the birds feeding on the waste using a cannon net, a technique requiring a special licence. The first step is setting the net.

Once captured, the birds are extracted from the net before being marked with individually numbered metal leg rings.

Whilst ringing the birds, we take measurements and study plumage characteristics. A sample are given orange colour rings which can be read with a telescope without the bird being recaptured.

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Acknowledgements

The group operates with the excellent support and cooperation of Veolia Environmental Services which operates the domestic landfill sites and Pitsea and Rainham.

We are grateful to the Banbury Ornithological Society, the Essex Birdwatching Society and GlaxoSmithKline for providing funding for the colour ringing programme, and to Risto Juvaste for supplying the rings.