Update on the Breeding Gulls in Leicester

As you know, I have been keeping an eye on the gulls breeding at the old British Shoe warehouse in Leicester. I've also been worrying about the threat of the building being demolished during July. Well the building is still there and the gulls have had a successful breeding season much to the annoyance of some people. I counted around 80 juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gulls last night although the total is higher as this is just juveniles resting on lower roofs. I still can't see much of the roof the gulls are nesting on. I estimate that there is about 50 pairs of LBB Gulls and between 10 and 20 pairs of Herring Gulls.

I have enjoyed photographing the gulls flying between the buildings:

Juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull

Juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull

Juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull

Juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gull

Adult Lesser Black-backed Gull

Adult Lesser Black-backed Gull (colour ringed  blue JMH, Gloucestershire)

Third Calendar Year Lesser Black-backed Gull

Second Calendar Year Lesser Black-backed Gull

Adult Herring Gull

Adult Herring Gull

Black-headed Gulls

So the Black-headed Gulls arriving in Leicestershire are not necessarily local breeding birds despite the fact it is still July.

At Shawell there has been a steady build up of Black-headed Gulls. At the beginning of July there was just four, then 32 appeared including a few juveniles, then 200 and by the 25th over 1000 were present. It is easy to think that the first small group had come from a local source. However, amongst the small group seen on 11th was one ringed in Poland and another ringed in Croatia.

So far this month I have recorded five colour-ringed Black-headed Gulls: three from Poland and one each from England and The Netherlands. This is not bad considering I've only successfully read 23 at Shawell since 2012. They are quite distant and the codes are very small. I have treated myself to a new scope with 70x magnification, so hopefully the extra 10x will improve my strike rate.

I have sightings of colour-ringed BHGs from Croatia, Denmark, England, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Scotland and The Netherlands. 

It just goes to show that a species we generally take for granted can turn out to be interesting.

TNCT Originally Ringed in Southern Poland was at Shawell on 25/07/15. Photo Tomascz Iciek

After writing this post, Steve Lister and Terry Sherwood saw TNCT at Rutland Water. This is quite remarkable and for me it is a really interesting insight into the wonderings of gulls around our local area.

Hooded Merganser

Just before lunchtime I was sitting down watching the rain falling heavily on my living room window. My phone rang and it was Colin Green and he sounded quite excited. He and Pete Asher had lost their senses and were out birding in the rain at Brascote Pits. They had spotted a small 'merganser' and thought it might be a Hooded Merganser. I looked at the rain on the window and then my wife and said 'hold the dinner I'm off to help Colin and Pete'.

On arrival I could sense something was wrong. True to form it had flown from its original location and they had lost it. 

Luckily Colin re-found it on one of the other pools. It was distant and appeared wary - good sign. It then completely let itself down by swimming directly towards us and came as close as it could. With better views we confirmed the identification.

Lovely duck, but sadly not the 200th genuinely wild bird for SW Leicestershire I'm afraid. 

Female Hooded Merganser

Good Times at Shawell

Gulls are starting to disperse having already bred and as a result more legs are appearing with colour rings. I read 28 colour rings yesterday including another Polish ringed Black-headed Gull. 

One of the colour-ringed gulls was a second calendar year Lesser Black-backed Gull, blue VX5M, ringed in Denmark. Nothing remarkable about the sighting at Shawell, but this morning I had an hour at the breeding site in Leicester and there was VX5M sitting on the roof in Leicester. This definitely links the two sites. The site in Leicester has food on offer at the re-cycle plant, which attracts roaming feeding birds as well as the breeding ones - maybe a Yellow-legged or Caspian Gull will be sitting on the roof sometime soon?

After last weekend's juvenile Caspian Gull/Yellow-legged Gull/hybrid I was hoping for some easier gulls. 

Anyway I spotted a gull on the main A5 Lagoon that immediately looked like a Caspian Gull, but a really small one - most likely a female. The small size was further exaggerated by the fact that its new primaries were still growing. I took some video of it and whilst watching it, I realised that it had a yellow colour ring. I can't read the code, but from what I can see, it may be either a Lithuanian or German ring. It could also be Polish, but I think it has numbers in the code and the Polish ones should have four letters. Of course this colour ring helps prove my identification, or at least that it originated from a good location.

Third-summer Caspian Gull (presumed to be a female), Shawell A5 Lagoons, 25/07/15

Third-summer Caspian Gull, Shawell A5 Lagoons

Although this gulls looks almost adult like, it still had black in the outer primary coverts. The primary pattern was almost adult like. P5 is not visible in the photo below and may well be moulted and not re-grown, or just hidden behind P6. The longest primary has a nice white tip.

Third-summer Caspian Gull, Shawell A5 Lagoons

One thing that is important when working with gulls is to realise that they are extremely variable. Size difference between the sexes can be massive. I saw a large adult male Yellow-legged Gull yesterday that completely dwarfed another adult stood close by.
  

Marbled White

Whilst I was scratching about at Shawell GP on Sunday trying to get a view of the pits to do my WeBS count, I came across about 20 of these stunners.

They are restricted to only a few locations in the East Midlands as far as I know, so this is a good addition to their local range.

Marbled White Butterfly, Shawell GP, 19/07/2015