... approaching the Baltic the characteristic calls became audible ...
... not a great deal of space left on those ledges ... in 2004 there were 2 pairs on this building - in 2016 there were 90 pairs ...
... one flew by exhibiting those legs that determine its IOC name - Black-legged Kittiwake ...
... then in the Tyne Bridge area there were already occupied nests on the bridge itself, despite their egg-laying date of mid-May ...
... and at much lower level on some of the old buildings beneath the bridge ...
... they really are pretty special birds and this is a pretty special place where they breed ... the most inland breeding colony of the species in the world ...
... their specialness goes on and on ... the most common gull species in the world ... the most common species of gull in Britain with 370,000 breeding pairs ... the most pelagic of all the gulls in the world ... in taxonomic terms they share their genus Rissa with only one other species - Red-legged Kittiwake ...
... they leave their breeding colonies in August and spend the winter in the North Sea and North Atlantic as far west as the eastern seaboard of North America and probably mingle with populations from elsewhere in their northern hemisphere circumpolar breeding range ...
... with these birds already on their breeding territories I thought back to the flocks of Kittiwakes I had seen just a few days earlier going east into the Solway Estuary ...
... were these birds returning perhaps from the North Atlantic to breeding colonies in Scandinavia or Arctic Russia where their nest ledges would still be ice-bound ? did some fly overland to the North Sea rather than going round the north of Scotland ? maybe satellite telemetry will provide the answers ...
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