The tropical winter holiday in the sun is nearly over.
 
Your stomach has settled down after an initial change in diet, the blistering sun doesn’t quite feel as hot anymore, and the all-inclusive plastic wristband has faded, but will no doubt last another few days until it’s time to leave for home. It’s been a time of relaxation and just thinking about yourself for a change, no-one bothering you – a bit of well deserved ‘me time’, before starting the long journey home, going back to work and starting over again.
 
 Monty will soon be thinking of the long journey home – he doesn’t have a wristband of course, but his missus does – and her cousin.

I love Christmas Day. Not really for the food gluttony, the perennial set of Matalan socks or the cheap aftershave from a distant Auntie; I love Christmas Day because it’s usually the one day in 365 I get closest to nature.
 
I’ve done the same thing on the same day for over 30 years – I spend Christmas afternoon on Foryd Bay near Caernarfon, north Wales. It’s the one day you are practically guaranteed not to see another fellow Homo sapien (or their pets) – it’s just you, the weather and the wildlife. I guess my job is all about sharing the wildlife I see, especially in the summer, with thousands of people. Well, for one day of the year, a day when almost everyone else is socialising and sharing, I do the exact opposite.
 
At around the same time as most people in the UK were salivating over their turkeys and nut-roasts, I was salivating over this chap… I didn’t want to eat him, just photograph him. He had a wristband on you see.

Foryd Bay has an ambience and a character that is unique and hard to describe. Redshanks and curlews were calling over the sound of the waves softly crashing over the shore, pale-bellied brent geese were honking on a distant sand-bank like an out-of-tune brass band on steroids, and just as I was methodically going through them looking for any birds with wristbands on – up popped the black-headed gull. I zoomed in a bit more, focused, and got him.

This week I learned where he was from. The kind folks in Norway that ringed him sent me a Word document with a comprehensive track record of JOU5’s history.
 
He was ringed as a chick (male) in Stavanger, Norway in June 2011. Between 2011 and 2014 he was sighted another 13 times, more or less near his birthplace. In late September 2014 however, he was spotted by Caernarfon Golf Club – 565 miles away from Stavanger, as a three-year-old. A few weeks later, on Christmas Day when I spotted him, he was in practically the same location.

JOU5 will probably migrate back to Norway soon as a full adult and breed there this summer for the first time before returning to Caernarfon – possibly with a set of clubs next time (put your own birdie gags here…).
 
How do we know this? Well, JOU5 joins a long list of black-headed gulls that have been ringed in Norway that have made Wales, and many other parts of the UK, their wintering vacation destination of choice. One Norwegian bird has been doing the same thing for over 20 years by the Glaslyn, Porthmadog, where he is spotted having returned every autumn.
 

These whooper swans spend their winter practically underneath the Glaslyn osprey nest, they will start their journey to the Arctic to breed at the end of March, just as the ospreys will be returning from Africa.

Monty, Glesni, the swans and indeed JOU5 are nearing the end of their holiday, as are millions of other birds that decide to migrate to another part of the world for the winter.
 
They all have an urge, a drive to start travelling, and this compulsion to start moving will be getting incrementally stronger by the day now. Soon, this urge to go will become stronger than the urge to stay, and the 2015 journey home will begin.

Our journey starts four weeks today on St Davids Day. DOP will open on 1st March, the signs will be put up for another season and the cameras will once again start rolling, including Live Streaming.
 
Hoards of birds will soon start moving north just as hoards of people will be excitedly awaiting their arrival. It won’t be long now, just the shortest month of the year to go and it will be time to stretch the neck muscles again and wipe the dust off the binoculars.
 
Enjoy the last few days of your winter vacation; a ‘thud’ is coming to a nest near you - and everybody is invited.