With a poor start to the spring ringing season it did not get much better with clear nights most migrants passed straight overhead though we did managed to catch and ring some migrants as always spring is very hit and miss  in Guernsey the best bird of spring migration was a golden oriel a new ringing tick for me I did spend a couple of days in Alderney at the latter end of spring migration one interesting part was one evening catching swallows on the migration North I managed to catch  several juvenile swallows it was too early for these to be from the local breeding population I believe that these birds are from breeding swallows in southern Europe and joining up with swallows migrating north. In May  we started the seabird season  starting with   a week at our local tip with the North Thames Gull group this is something that we have been doing for several years now organised by Paul varon who's been doing a colouring project with our local breeding population of gull for several years the target species being lesser black backed gulls though we colouring all gull species which has been a great success with so much more being learnt about the movement of gulls and is now giving us a greater understanding of these great birds and their life the general seabird ringing this year it was quite a good season though we did not manage to get out as much as I would like to do we managed to colouring a good sample of greater cormorants and the small sample of shags with the shags showing a better breeding season than last year in July a small group of us went up to Burhou for two nights of ringing storm petrels again this trip proved to be a great success with 389 new birds ring and a total of 114 re-traps