Gulls from Dambovita Romania

[JanJ]

Some nice Gulls from Romania by Cristian Mihai 1,11. 09

JanJ

[marsmuusse]

Hi Jan,

Do you know Cristian Mihai personally?
Is he living close to a place where he can easily observe loads of birds, including ringed ones preferably?

If so, it may be an idea to arrange some field observations regarding migration, moult strategy and timing, phenotypic characteristics, population dynamics, etc on cachinnans and east european micha's.
Ideally he could research random samples and describe all age classes month by month, and illustrate it with (colour) ringed birds, similar to this page:

http://www.gull-research.org/hg/HG2CY01.htm

Of course, it will be a lot of work, but I (and others?) will help him out where necessary. But first of all, would he like to do such field work in Rumania, scoring primaries, scapulars, etc ?

EDIT: Didn't need to address this mail to Jan. I see Cristian is a member as well!

[JanJ]

Hi Mars.

I don´t know Cristian personally, just from Birdforum where he posts a lot of good quality gull images from Romania in the Bird forum fun quizzes gull section. I thought his good images could adress a braoader public. I lead him on to this site, which I now see that he has joined. So you could ask him directly.

Cheers
Jan

[Theo Muusse]

Surely, 14833m (first pic) is not a cach, I hope. A 3rd winter without a mirror and with such a head hopefully comes from the mystery colony from Russia.

Theo

[JanJ]

Two more of Cristians gull. The faint mirror is hardly visible but a more obvious one on the other wing.

The idea is michahellis.

JanJ

The images turned out smaller then expected.

[Cristian Mihai]

Hi everybody,

I have a relative large collection of pics with Yellow-legged Gulls and Caspian Gulls, all of them taken in Romania. Most of them were taken in/near Bucharest. All are available for gull-research . If you want to start a systematical research here in Romania, I'm interested, but will have to discuss about this.
By the way, I opened a new topic in Caspian Gull section (with a few pics taken this summer on the Black Sea coast).
You can also see some pics taken by me here: http://www.lou.bertalan.de/birds/index.php

[Cristian Mihai]

As you can see from the Exif, the pics uploaded by JanJ are taken on November 1st. Location: the river Dambovita (this river crosses the city of Bucharest from north-west to south-east). I took these pics nearby the city border, in a area where there are usually hundreds or thousands of gulls (mainly ridibundus, michahellis and cachinnans).

[marsmuusse]

Hi Cristian,
Thanks for the offer, there is room enough on gull-research. But before I receive tons of pictures from Rumania, I can also make an account for you, so you can upload pictures and text yourself.

About this research: the original idea was (some years ago) to start co-operation between gull enthusiasts from different regions in Europe. Wouldn't it be nice, that people concentrate on their own (if possible ringed !) birds to describe phenotypics, behaviour, migration, moult strategy, etc and make it possible to publish this at a central point on the web(www.gull-research.org).

In concreto: suppose Cristian from Rumania is interested in head pattern development in L ridibundus, and he wants to know the extent of this pattern from October-January over different European countries. He writes down his idea, explains how scoring in the field should be done, et voila: 8 or 10 people score head patterns in 75 birds in their own neighbourhood. We send all data to Cristian and he writes his findings.

So really,

[Cristian Mihai]

Hi marsmuusse,

I think that, for the beginning, the best idea for me is to help other older gull-research members. As you probably know, I live in Bucharest and I'm able to provide long term studies concerning a significant number of gulls from these species:
1. Black-headed Gull- is the most common species here all over the year. There are some small breeding populations inside the city or nearby.
2. Yellow-legged Gull - is the most common large species here. There are important breeding populations in the city (on the building roofs).
3. Common Gull - is a winter guest. You can see at list a few hundreds in the city or nearby, every winter (December-March).
4. Caspian Gull - is mainly a winter guest, but there are vagrant(?) individuals all over the year.

During the summer I could also provide some information about the gulls from the Black Sea coast (as you can already see from my posts).

So, I'm waiting for suggestions.

Best regards,

Cristian