Norwegian and Swedish Black-headed Gulls

I was back in Alvaston Park, Derby again today, looking at..... yes, you've guessed it.. Black-headed Gulls. There were still about 100 birds present on the small lake (along with at least 3 Common Gulls), but I didn't manage to see any of the 4 ringed birds I'd had at the start of November. Instead, I found 2 new ringed gulls!!

The first one I saw was another Swedish bird. Annoyingly, I only saw it for a few seconds, and only managed to get the first 4 digits of its ring number, 6439.

Swedish gull

The second bird, a Norwegian bird, with a lovely Darvic ring J3KY, was a little more confiding.

Norwegian gull, J3KY

I'm registered with the Norwegian Colour Ringing Scheme, because I reported another bird here back in December 2017 (see here), so I entered the details of this bird, and found out straight away that it had been ringed, as a pullus (chick), 1071kn away, on an island near Oslo on 15th June 2012! It has been re sighted 9  times in the intervening years, but always in Norway, and always in the summer months. Today's sighting was the first foreign sighting, and the first winter sighting.

This bird is the 12th ringed Black-headed Gull I've seen in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire since August 2018. Nationalities so far are British ringed (3), Swedish ringed (3), Danish ringed (2), Norwegian ringed (1), Finnish ringed (1), Lithuanian ringed (1) and Polish ringed (1).