Photo Stuart McLeod WUR occasionally receives strange messages, such as an email with a picture of a dead European Shag with a blue ring around its claw with the letters WUR. The Scotsman who found the bird, Stuart McLeod, sent WUR the message last month. The message was passed on to marine ornithologist Mardik Leopold, who quickly determined that the bird had nothing to do with WUR.
‘The European Shag is a smaller cousin of the cormorant we have in the Netherlands’, says Leopold. ‘It is a rare guest in the winter, in harbours or other places where there are rocks. The bird inhabits rocky coastal areas, such as the ones found in Great Britain and Norway. The picture behind me shows two European Shags that were photographed in the Texel ferry port last week.’
Leopold reported the bird to the British Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, with whom he is in touch regularly. ‘I was provided with the bird’s life story.’ BWUR (the B stands for blue) was tagged as a chick in 2015 on the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth Bay near Edinburgh. Since then, the animal has been sighted dozens of times along the Scottish East Coast.
The last time it was seen alive was in December of last year. McLeod found the dead bird on the beach near Edinburgh on 5 November. He believes the bird may have perished in the storm Babet, which caused the deaths of thousands of birds, according to Leopold. BWUR was part of a study on the habitats of European Shags along the Scottish East Coast.
