Last Tern mist netting for the season

Last night we mist netted Terns close to Blato colony. It was full moon but we went because it was last time we could organize before holidays.

In two hours we caught 8 Terns, including one from Last session..

All in all we ringed more than 108Common Terns in this colony. 88 of them were colour ringed. 27 were flying birds and 20 were full adults:) Not bad for the season. Hope there will be more of them found :)

One more thing I forgot in my last post:
In July we also ringed Lesser Kestrels on only Croatian colony. It was really hard day. 7 of us were on the island for 4 hours and managed to ring only 8 birds(including 1 adult female) Most birds were colour ringed, so keep your eyes open for them.

Lesser Kestrels over the colony

I think this is my last post till September, Off to holidays:)

Few news

So I didn't write anything for 3 months and now 2 posts in one day:)

I forgot 2 things.

1)  I finally answered ALL recoveries! I hope no one is angry:) Once more I would like to thank all people who reported my gulls and hope this won't happen again! At the moment I got around 3200 colour ringed BHGs and 2300 recoveries of 1050 different individuals.. Much more than I expected:)

2) There's a new blog out on gulls!  Fabijan started writing blog and you can check it on http://gull-rs.blogspot.com/  He ringed good number of breeding birds and it will be interesting to see where they are going. Also I hope he'll ring good numbers in winter:) I keep my fingers crossed!

enough for now:)

Long time no write..

Where to start? I really didn't write for long time now.. I'll try to remember all the things we did in this period and put them in chronical order :)

In the second half of April we went again on Mljet to ring Shags. This season ended with 14 ringed Shags which is not a big number, but as we'll see later it is a funny season and some timings were wrong..The colony we thought we'll ring most of pulli ended up with only 2 ringed and others were already flying, what is a bit strange for April.. On the other hand we found YLG chick big enough for plastic ring on April 18th which is way too early..

In the begging of May I went again on Mljet to do the census of gulls and was accompanied with two photographers (Roman and Maciej) which resulted with lots of nice photos. We finally found one breeding pair of Audouin's Gull!! After 3 years without breeding in the Park.

Another good thing was that we were looking for ringed birds nesting. We found 5 of them all ringed on the same island on the same day in 2008 as chicks:)

June is month when we ring chicks:) It started on Mljet with Common Terns and YLG. It was a late date (June 8th ) and I was afraid that most YLG chicks will be flying but I was wrong :) We colorringed more than 200 YLG and It was one of the best years until now. Other thing is that most of them were allready able to fly but seems that they didn't know that:) So I think that mortality rate will be low.. Already I got 2 recoveries from these birds , both from Serbia..

One of the reasons we went so late is that common terns chicks would be big enough for colour ring and both of them were:)

Noon break on YLG colony

After the seaside it was time to ring Terns in continental part of Croatia.

First was Blato. This year it was a really big colony (around 120 pairs) definitely the biggest in Croatia. 

During this month we ringed chicks(82 of them ) and adults(more than 20). All adults and most pulli were colour ringed so I hope we'll get some recoveries. 

We cought adults in mist net during night. It was really fun and these were first adult terns in my hands.. This year there were BHGs breeding on the same islet as terns so we ringed some of them also. We also got few in mist net. I'm curious to see where will they go. 

We aslo cought one YLG . I wonder where this one is from??

During last few weeks I meet few guys that are photographing birds on Blato so we have some recoveries of these birds. Some Terns which we ringed in nest are flaying.. It will be interesting to see in next years how many of them will come back..

We also ringed BHGs on two more places Jelas fishponds and Kopački rit.

We were late for big colony on Jelas as most of the chicks were flying when we get there so we went to smaller one and ringed 13 of them(5 with CR). Additionally we ringed 6 Whiskerd terns.

My very first colour ringed BHG pulli :)

We went two times on Kopački. It was really cool. You have to walk more than 500 m trough the water  to get to the colony. But it was worth it!! In two visits we ringed more than 150 whiskerd terns and almost 50 BHGs(more than 20 colour ringed). 

this was White Stork attacking White-Tailed Sea Eagle. It looked awesome!!

Durign June we went with Basrek to ring Storks . During two days we ringed more than 100 chicks, mostly with colour rings.

And the last on this report is Okučani fishponds where we went to see the new mixed heron colony. It was great, altough we were too late for most of the birds. We ringed around 40 birds and I have 4 new species ringed : Squacco Heron, Little Egret, Night Heron and Spoonbill. 

That's it for now. I would like to thank all the photographers for using their photos. 

We plan to go one more time to catch Terns in the night at Blato and then it is silence untill September and Poreč rubbish tip.

Have a nice summer!