Hiddensee Gulls

Black Redstart, Seaton, Devon ( Library Picture - Copyright T D Wright )

Nice to see a BlackRed at Axmouth Yacht Club today, even though I've seen loads of them in Portugal recently. They really are exquisite. Anyway, I've been catching up on everyone else's blogs and was interested to see Steve Waite's green-ringed gull which at first seemed a Caspian then became unsatisfactory on closer examination. It reminds me of the type of gull I often look at and wonder about, then decide that it's not definite enough and give up on. One such gull was the 'Hiddensee Gull' which I took some phonescoped video of on 20th October 2013 from Tower Hide. It had a green ring XTDN so after I'd given up trying to i.d. it I sent the details off and thought the ringers would tell me what it was. Well, the letter made me laugh ( I wasn't internetting then) as it described the species as 'Herring Gull (Group) (Larus argentatus/cachinnans/michahellis)' when it was ringed on 7th June 2013 as a nestling. This had been at Reddern in Germany, North of Dresden and close to the Polish border. It had been seen in France in September too. For me, this was more evidence that, one day, all these 'splits' will be 'lumped' once again. By that, I mean that Yellow-legged and Caspian will be regional variants of Herring once again, just as they used to be, and these yellow-legged omissus birds still are. Redpolls might go the same way too, eh? It's all interesting stuff though, so make your own minds up. Here's that ancient video (above) anyway.