It's A Small World - Old Meets New

Mike Townsend writes:

During my recent six week trip to Canada ringing at Long Point Bird Observatory, (trip report to follow in due course), it was really great to meet up with a friend and trainee from the very early days of the Stanford Ringing Group.

Richard Dobbins was a fresh-faced 17 year old when I first meet him. Richard was training with us for a couple of years before going to University in Hull but he kept in touch until he graduated and moved to London. Some 25+ years later we met up again by chance at Long Point. He was still the same old Richard - still great company and it was as if we had seen each other only last week. Richard has now moved back to Pembrokeshire in Wales and runs his own ringing group (Teifi RG) undertaking a CES and ringing seabirds. 

You can imagine my surprise when, on my return to the U.K., I discovered that one of our latest recruits Becca is currently on Skomer monitoring seabirds. A phone call to Richard told me he was off to Skomer that very night to ring Shags and other seabirds on Midland Island. 

Here are the photos that recorded the event of one of the earliest members of SRG with one of the newest.

Becca at Shag's nest

Richard

Becca watching ringing of GBB Gull chick