banded gull

[Luke Berkey]

I saw this laughing gull in NC last week. Growing up a few miles from the ocean, in NJ, I have seen thousands of these birds over the years. This is the first one I have ever seen banded. I wish I could have gotten the numbers from it to get it's info. It actually had two bands on it's right leg. It's hard to see from the cell pic but there was a metal band and a green plastic one also.

 

[Jon Yenulonis]

When I was a kid, probably close to forty years ago, my Father and I found a dead, banded Ring Billed Gull along the shore of Lake Erie in Cleveland.

Modern day, about ten years ago, I was surf fishing along Virginia's Eastern Shore when I had a young gull flew into and got tangled-up in my line. It was banded too.

I don't remember the first one's details, but the last one was too young to fly when banded several months earlier along the Northern New Jersey Coast.

(Two banded Seagulls, but, I've yet to shoot a banded Duck......) LOL!

Jon

 

[Chris S.]

I saw a banded gull in ocean city new jersey last summer so I googled it and there is a Dr. Ellis from Tufts university that has a gull banding project there is a youtube video aswell for gull banding.

 

[Al Hansen]

That is a first for me. Thanks for the picture, Luke. I have never seen one. By the way, Jon, one of these years you will get your banded duck. I started hunting in 54 and then in 02, I shot my first banded duck.
Al

 

[John P]

Ive seen a few out fishing. Especially when we are sharking. Last year had a.double banded herring gull with what looked like a tracker on it.

 

[Hank Fish]

Outside of Burlington, VT in the middle of Lake Champlain is a set of 4 islands named "4 Brothers" One of the 4 islands had a large breeding colony of gulls, mostly ring billed but also some herring and black back. In the early 90's when I was at UVM we would go out to the islands looking for waterfowl nests with our professors around this time of year, one of the "bonuses" was counting the gull nests. We would line up shoulder to shoulder, ponchos made of trash bags and big hats, clicking away with our counters.......IIRC we counted somewhere around 32,000 nests on a single 4 acre island. Yes it was a mess and stunk like HELL.

Well here is the band part. After the nests hatched the High Peaks Audubon Society (from NY side of the lake) would go on the island and band a whole bunch of the flightless chicks. Here is where it gets interesting, after the gulls left the island we would go out in late summer and pick around at all the carcases looking for bands on the dead chicks. As you can understand mortality was high and there was alot of picking to be had, it was gross and really stunk by then, but fun was had by all.

As would be expected most of the recoveries were ring billed gulls, but we found a few herring gull bands also. My best find was a herring gull banded on 6/12/1982 and recovered on 8/22/1999, I believe this is the second oldest band recovery on record for a herring gull. All of the bands were size 4 in both aluminum and stainless, with a few color markers thrown in.

The colored bands in the picture are from pigeons.