Thursday 15 February 2018

Scooby Snacks

So last year Tesco's were selling off their old stock of dog biscuits really cheap and I had a plan, I bought as much as I could, something in the region of 60kg and, as I don't own a dog, stored them all in the shed for a day like today. This morning there was about 500 Gulls around the patch, they probably came in with the gales yesterday, so I grabbed about 20kg of dog biscuits and went down to Moast Beach and chucked the lot in the sea! Within about 30 minutes the Gull numbers had shot up to near 2000! Amazingly more than half of them were Common Gulls and only 1 Black-headed Gull, plus the usual array of big/small, light/dark Herring Gulls, of the 100 or so Greater Blacks present there was an interesting, very black and white 'checkerboard' 1w that didn't hang around too long. Best of all though were 2 Iceland Gulls (quite scarce on Shetland so far this winter) one of which had a fair bit of 'Hybrid Swarm' Gull (Kumlien's) in it.
Iceland Gull
Kumlien's hybrid swarm Gull

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