spoonbills

A pair of spoonbills at Lodmoor RSPB reserve, Weymouth. This is a bird you usually see as a white dot across the other side of Poole Harbour but when they turn up at Lodmoor you can get quite close to them.

A pair of herring gulls at the entrance to Weymouth Harbour. And what's left of their lunch. You can see here how much bigger male gulls are than females. They also have proportionately much larger heads and bills. In all of this family (and most of the whole order Charadridae) this is the only way to separate the sexes. The female gull is wearing a coloured ring. I've now heard back from the ringers and it turns out that it was ringed by Luke Phillips of the RSPB 6 weeks earlier at Radipole Lake, which is a mile or so to the east. So not a record-breaking recovery but all these little bits of information add to our knowledge of bird behaviour.