A bird found alive and well on a Scottish island, aged 45, is the oldest ever recorded in Britain, experts have confirmed. A volunteer bird ringer tagged the Fulmar gull as a fledgling in the Orkney Islands in 1975 - and it was spotted again in June last year on an uninhabited Scottish island.
The ring showed it had reached the ripe age of 45 years, nine months and 12 days. Tom Stewart, a spokesperson for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) confirmed it was among the oldest fulmars ever recorded in Britain.
He said: "We often can't check their rings because we don't know where the bodies are, so we rarely know how long they lived for. But this is the longest time that has elapsed between a Fulmar being ringed and being re-sighted.
"Fulmars return to their colonies so they can be tracked more easily, but they usually only get ringed once in their lifetimes. This bird has been re-ringed twice because it's been going for so long and the marks have rubbed off, but normally birds only get one ring.
"This is the oldest Fulmar we have on record. There are tales of another one that can't be verified from the 1980s that might have been 50
"Fulmars have a tube nose and a distinctive bill like an albatross. It is quite a small bird, but looks like an albatross, and the oldest seabird we know of is an albatross called Wisdom who's around 70, she's a celebrity bird."
Born in 1951, Wisdom is a wild female Laysan albatross and the oldest known wild bird in the world. National Geographic said Wisdom was first tagged in 1956, but when she was found scientists conservatively estimated she was five years old. She was still laying eggs in February 2020.
She broke the record for world's oldest bird at age 51, according to National Geographic.
