Seasonal Sampling

The recurring theme for my blog posts is that I get behind on them, and this one started off that way! Today is meant to be my last day in the Falklands until October (well, technically yesterday was meant to be my last day, so we’ll see what happens). I have a few other posts planned that I will try and get around to once I’m back in Aberdeen, but I have a bit of time now, so I figured I’d see what I’d get written now.

A highlight of being here in the Falklands, as well as being one of the important things for me to be doing here, is the boat days collecting samples. My zooplankton samples are collected from a 10m boat called the RV Jack Sollis, which is a very nice catamaran. It’s size is great for collecting zooplankton, but not ideal once the swell gets bigger, and I’m not sure if this is a well known fact about the Falkland Islands, but it gets windy here!! Whilst here, I’ve been able to get out on the boat 4 times, 3 of those to collect zooplankton, and once to assist with side scanning. Ideally, we would have been able to get out at least one other time during that period, but the weather has been against us. Having said that, I have definitely enjoyed the days I have been able to get out – especially because of the opportunity it provides to see some of the amazing wildlife here! I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that my project sampling means I can see penguins, albatross, dolphins and so many more incredible species!

The first sampling trip was in mid-February, so late summer here. It was also the trip that had the highest variety of species (both in the zooplankton samples and seen from the boats). I collect my samples in Bongo nets, which means that there is a rigid frame with two nets attached. These are of different mesh sizes to make sure that I’m able to collect a range of species at different sizes. For all the of the trips that I’ve done, we’ve towed the nets behind the boat for 10 minutes, but for the spring samples (which were collected before I arrived), they were only towed for 5 minutes just because of the shear amount of biomass in the samples. Having sub-sampled and packed up some of those samples for transport north with me tomorrow, I can see why there was the shorter time! Once the samples have been collected, all of the zooplankton is washed down into the end of the net (known as the cod end) and then sieved to separate the samples from the water for preservation. As I’m using a combination of techniques to identify the zooplankton species, half of each catch is stored in ethanol (for DNA barcoding) and the other half in formalin (for morphological identification).

I have three sample sites, and we do 3 repeats at each site, so each of the boat days have been around 9 hours, give or take a bit – it all depends on the biomass. The most recent trip I was on in mid-May was the shortest, as there wasn’t a huge amount in the samples (expected for coming into winter) so it was very quick to sieve everything. Compare that to the March samples, which were dominated by jellyfish and comb jellies (hydromedusae and ctenophores), and we had to sieve both nets simultaneously, as the samples took so long to sieve because the jellies kept clogging up the mesh.

Part of my project is to look at the seasonal changes in the zooplankton abundance and distribution, so it’s great to already be able to see changes just by sieving the samples on the boat. The biomass in February was reasonably high at some sites (I have mixed feelings about copepods – I don’t have to count them for my project, but they do make it harder to find the things I do have to catch), and although the weights of the samples were similar in March, the range and dominance of species was so different. Now that I’ve gone through some samples from other months in the laboratory, I think I can say (based on observational data, not statistical analysis) that February has had the highest species diversity so far, and also the greatest diversity of Orders and Families as well. Despite the reasonably high biomass, the March samples had a relatively low species diversity, as there was a clear dominance in the samples, that I haven’t seen in any of the other samples that I’ve collected. Once again, based on observations, it does look like the ‘prize’ for lowest species diversity goes to the mid-October samples, which seem to be almost exclusively lobster krill larvae. This would be a less time-consuming observation if it weren’t for the fact that I have to identify the different larvae life stages as well as just counting them. I have discovered the joys of sub-sampling while looking at these. The May samples have had the lowest biomass, but despite this, have still had a range of species.

I mentioned that there have also been amazing species seen from the boat, this was especially the case on the first trip I went out on. Somewhere (packed at this point) I have a list of all the species that we spotted, but the fact that we saw three different species of whales has got to be the most insane highlight. An advance warning on the whales – although I will be adding photos to these blog posts once I have better internet, I will not be posting whale pictures because sadly I don’t have any! Although it is incredible that I am able to see so much wildlife on the collection days, I am primarily there to work, so I can observe, but can only take photos when there’s nothing else I need to be doing. We caught a glimpse of some minke whales and sei whales on that first trip – they have very defined sickle shape dorsal fins, but are also very different sizes (with minke whales being the smallest of the baleen whales). The best (and most exciting) whale observation was a young humpback that was curious about us, and was swimming around the boat, and we could see its back close by as it surfaced for air. Despite the lack of photos, I have a very clear mental image of that whale. As well as the zooplankton samples that day, there was also someone from SAERI who was filtering water as part of an eDNA project, who could look around more than we could when trying to get my samples through the sieves, and at one point she was calling out “There’s a whale! … There’s a whale! … Nobody cares.” We had to reassure her that we would LOVE to look at the whale, but we couldn’t until we were done going through the samples.

If any animal was guilty of showing up at the worst possible moment, it would have to be the Peal’s dolphins. Anyone who I have spoken to regularly since coming here will have already heard these complaints, but I am still amazed at the timing of these dolphins. They showed up on every one of the boat trips, and like clockwork, would arrive as I was having to sieve my samples. They’d be all around the boat, spy hopping and showing off, and then would swim off by the time I’d finished processing that repeat, and then would generally show up as I started to sieve the next sample! I will say for them, at least they did come close enough to the boat that I could generally watch them out of the corner of my eye, so it could have been worse!! Their appearance would often end up distracting my nice volunteers (one of my supervisors referred to them as ‘dolphin criers’) – amazingly, their effect was so strong that the others would forget what they had been doing a moment before. I can’t say a blame them, to be fair.

The birdlife here is insane!! As my first sampling trip was (just) within the first week of me being here, it meant I saw 4 new species of penguin in my first week here! I’ve already mentioned the penguins seen at Yorke Bay – loads of gentoos, a couple of Kings and then a few Magellanics (not that I counted the ones from Yorke Bay, as I didn’t spot them until going through my photos. From the boat, we could see rafts of penguins swimming, preening and porpoising around. I think I’ve seen gentoos on each of the boat trips, though surprisingly not to many in February. The main penguins I saw on that first trip were Magellanic and Rockhoppers. I still have a goal to see the rockies on land, so that’s high on the list for the next trip (I did technically see two moulting on land at the end of the season, but I missed out on seeing a proper rocky colony this time – saw the evidence of what had been an active colony. So many feathers!!) I definitely enjoyed watching them swim about and watch the boat. The gentoos seem to be the most curious about the boat, and on the day where we were side scanning (a way to survey the shape of the seafloor and figure out what the benthic habitat type is) we had a group of 4 that were following us for most of the day. There’s a small colony of King penguins on land near where we sample, so it was possible to spot 4 species on a sampling trip, just the Kings needed binoculars!

Another bird highlight for me would have to be the Procellariiformes, or tube noses. I wouldn’t be able to tell you which of these I was most excited to see, the first ones we saw were sooty shearwaters rafting in the morning, and that was pretty special. When the wind was in the right direction, you could smell them – which might sound like an odd comment, but they do smell nice!! (See earlier blog posts from my time on Skomer for more detail on how nice Manxies and Storm Petrels smell). Black-browed albatross have also been seen in large numbers regularly – they seem to be the tube noses that are most curious about what we’re doing (or more likely, the least fussed by our presence – they are very large birds) and tend to be around the boat and ‘supervising’ us in large numbers. They’ll also fly close by and directly over the boat, which is incredible. While flying, they’re very graceful, and they’re also reasonably graceful on the sea (except take-off). Like with the rockies, seeing albatross on land – especially the chicks – is high on my list of “things I’d like to see”. As mean as it sounds, I do want to see them try and land. The videos I’ve seen of that are amazing. Because I could probably spend a long time talking about sea birds, I’ll quickly go through some of the others I’ve seen (partly because it’s now lunch time and I’m quite hungry). Southern Giant Petrels have been regular sightings, both from the boat, but also while walking around Stanley. On windy days, they’ll be flying around the harbour, and have flown directly above me while I’ve been walking along the waterfront. While there not as big as albatross, they are still an impressively large bird to have so close. When side scanning, although there weren’t sooty shearwaters, there were large numbers of Great Shearwaters. These ones actually reminded me more of the Manxies, because of their dark back and white belly – though in this case, a brown back rather than navy. The most special tube nose I saw was the silvery fulmar. I’m a big fan of fulmar, and these were only seen on the later two trips (they’re not in the Falklands all year around), so it was amazing to spot a southern hemisphere species! Once I’d seen them, my goal was then to get a good photo of them. I didn’t quite manage that, but I did at least manage the latter half of the statement. It’s a start!!

Despite the jokes sometimes made about us only going for “fair-weather fieldwork” (out of necessity rather than choice) we were quite lucky with the weather for the sampling days. Technically, the only things we had to watch carefully were the wind and swell, so we could have had rainy days, but we did have some sunshine and blue sky on all of my zooplankton days. The side scanning day started out calm, and got rougher during the day. We were expecting a front to come through, but it did hit earlier than expected. What made that interesting was when I had to grab the freshly boiled kettle to stop it from sliding off the table – other things were left to fall, but that was definitely a risk!! Once it was secure, I had a moment where I wondered why I wasn’t feeling seasick given how bad the rocking was, then decided that was a bad train of thought to go down.

I could probably say a lot more about the sampling days, but what I can definitely say to round this off is that I’m really looking forwards to more sea days once I come back in October!

Getting Stuck In

Once I was in the Falklands, I basically had to get right into it. As my initial flight had been delayed, we were looking for a weather window to go out and collect zooplankton samples as soon as possible – so I needed to get all kitted out and ready to go for whenever we could set out. I think started to get a feel for what sampling would be like right away, as the initial plan was to go out on Thursday, which was quickly changed to Friday, and then we ended up heading out on the Monday. I’m not sure if I was jet lagged so much as sleep deprived. The delay we had taking off from Brize Norton did mean that I could essentially arrive and go straight to bed (something that helped me get adjusted to the time zone when I arrived in NZ), but it didn’t seem to work quite as well this time, despite the smaller time difference. Maybe it was something about going backwards? The fact I’d had a full day awake, and had to stay awake through the night before probably didn’t help. Anyway, we decided that even if I was going to be going into the office that I could just send Jesse a message when I was up and ready to go, rather than going into work for the start of the normal day (which I was very happy about, as the working day starts at 8am here). In the office, I was able to meet people, including my other SAERI supervisor, Paul, and find out where my desk was going to be.

Partly because we needed to head out to get a few things anyway, and partly because I left my laptop at the house (I brought the one I’d been asked to deliver though – so I was a successful postman, even if unsuccessful in other areas), Jesse and I set out to get a few things. Higher on the list than expected was for me to get a Falkland Island SIM card (though decided to be essential when my “Welcome to the Falkland Islands” text informed me of the going rates for my UK SIM here). More essential for work was a pair of steel toed boots, which I am quite happy with. Their fleece lined, and so far they have been successful in keeping my feet warm when out on a boat all day, which is not normally the case for me! This trip out to get equipment also served as a whistle-stop tour of Stanley, so by the time we got back to SAERI, I knew what sort of things there were around town, and vaguely what part of town they were in. Actually finding them again would take a bit of extra work – where Google maps is of limited use. There is a charity shop in Stanley, and when I was looking online to find out where it was, the closest I could find to actual directs were some coordinates. This seems helpful in theory until you saw that the coordinates were for a random point in the South Atlantic Ocean, several hundred kilometres north of the Falklands. Other important things purchased included a ball of wool, because we got a notebook for me in a shop that also sold wool, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get something so I could knit. That ball of wool ended up as socks.

By the end of the week, I also had a new boat suit (insulated, reflective and, most importantly, both waterproof and buoyant). I have no intention of falling in the water here (which ranges in temperature from 3 to 8 degrees I believe), and in fact, my risk assessment form for coming down here specifically advises against it, but it’s nice to know that if I were to fall in the water, I would stay at the surface, should be warm(ish) and would be visible. While the waterproof-ness has so far proven effective when hosing down zooplankton nets, I imagine that in the water, the arm and leg holes might let something in. It’s been a very useful piece of kit so far, and while I won’t be uploading photos here until I’m back in Aberdeen, so far it seems to feature heavily on my twitter account (I caved and got a ‘science twitter’ after I arrived here – I’m reasonably bad at posting, but the conversation had after one of the images I posted did help with the identification of an amphipod, which is pretty cool). If you would like to see any of these photos – the few posts I have are either microscope photos or boat day photos, feel free to look at my creatively named @RhianTaylor twitter account.

After we’d got some kit, Jesse and I were actually meeting up with someone called Rebecca (who works at the fisheries department – there are actually to Rebecca’s there, and the other one is coincidentally someone I know from uni!). Rebecca is the only person who has spent any time looking at the zooplankton here, so a good person for me to know! Based on the conversation with her on my first full day, we also decided that, given what is known about the life cycle of one of my key organisms here, and my initial delay in coming down, it would make sense for me to extend my trip here until mid-June. As part of my project I am planning on looking into the life history of a species of lobster krill that is abundant here in the Falklands, and they apparently spawn in June, so definitely a time of year where it would be useful to get a sample from. I did find it funny how quickly we came to the decision to extend my trip though, though I had anticipated that something like that might happen.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at SAERI (we had gone via the house so I could pick up my laptop and do something useful), though a particular highlight of the first day was that first evening.  It was calm and clear, so we had planned on going just outside of Stanley to Yorke Bay, where there’s a gentoo penguin colony. Yorke Bay is only a short drive from Stanley itself (if you look at Stanley on a map, there’s a headland immediately to the east of the town, and Yorke Bay is one of the north-facing bays there). During the Falklands War, this bay area was a minefield, and so for quite a while, the whole dune and beach area was not accessible. I hadn’t realised how recently it was that the mines had been removed – when I first started telling people I had this PhD project, someone I rowed with in Kingston (I’d joined a rowing club as a way to get out of the house, talk to people and get some exercise since I was working from home at the time) had told me that it was now safe to walk on the beaches, so I was aware that mines had been cleared relatively recently, what I hadn’t realised was that it was as recent as the end of 2020! I’ve been there several times now, and it’s hard to think about the fact that for nearly 40 years, people weren’t able to enjoy the area. One of the side effects from the mine clearing is that there are now areas of quicksand.

There was a moment on the drive over where we thought we weren’t going to make it to the penguins. Before you get to Yorke Bay, you have to drive out over the dunes and, like a lot of places in the Falklands, the driving is off-road. Technically, there is a track that people drive on, but the sand in the area is very fine, so blows about easily, and when Jesse and I were driving over a slightly larger patch of sand, the car didn’t quite make it out. We tried quite a few different things to try and get the car moving – dug the sand around the wheels, put stones underneath to give them something solid to grip on, I pushed the car while Jesse tried to drive out – but nothing we did was making a difference. If anything, the wheels were now deeper in the sand than they had initially been! Luckily, after we’d had a chance to try these, another car came up and offered to help. We repeated some of the previous tactics (now with 3 people to push), though still the car was not moving. When we were thinking that we might have to call someone to tow us out, the other pair found a bit of rope in their car, and (on the second attempt, just to keep things tense), our car was successfully pulled out of the sand. We all decided to walk the rest of the way to the colony.

I could spend hours in Yorke Bay, in all weathers. Walking over the dunes, and seeing that penguin colony is incredible every time, but especially that first time. I had seen penguins before – while in New Zealand I had seen both Little Blue and Yellow Eyed penguins, but not even close to the numbers of gentoo penguins that could be seen as soon as that colony came into view. I’m not sure the exact estimate for that colony, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was around 1000 (give or take a few)! We found a spot to sit, and it just seemed like there were penguins as far as the eye could see! The sounds and smells of the colony are almost as amazing as the sight of it. Because of the time of year, the chicks were just coming up to fledging, but still had quite a bit of their downy feathers. The benefit of coming in the evening was that the parents would be coming into shore for their days fishing, so all the chicks were hopeful that they would get fed. Gentoo parents don’t make it easy for their chicks to have a meal – the chicks will spot the adults from a way off (though from the looks of things, they might sometimes be optimistic rather than correct about if it really is their parent), and will run up to the adult. At this point, their parent will start running off, making the chicks chase it around, generally tripping over each other, and sometimes falling face down into the sand, until they can catch up with the adult and earn their meal. Presumably this helps the chicks gain stamina, and maybe gets them in the habit of chasing something for their food? I’m not sure – but it’s good fun to watch! I do regret not filming that, there was one group that ran by right in front of us at one point, and I’d love to watch that back. Somehow, that feels like one of the most ‘wildlife documentary’ moments that I’ve had. I did take quite a lot of photos though, and one of my favourite photos I’ve taken here is still one of a chick I took that evening – it’s kicking its way through the sand, and I’ve taken to calling it “the grumpy toddler”, as it just looks like its sulking because no one has brought it dinner yet. We ended up staying on the beach until the sun started setting (which, considering it was early February, was coming up to 9pm).

As well as the gentoos on the beach, there’s also the occasional King Penguin, and there were a few on the beach that evening (doubling my total number of penguin species seen in one evening). They don’t breed in Yorke Bay (though in the last month, one pair has been seen with a chick there for the first time ever, which is very exciting), but you do see the occasional few – these ones all looked like they were mid-moult, so not their most impressive plumage, but I was still very happy to see them. When I was going through my photos later that evening, I spotted that there were also a few Magellanic Penguins on the beach, which neither Jesse nor I had spotted at the time (in our defence, they were at the waters edge quite a way down the beach). Despite the fact that they were clearly there, I didn’t count it that I’d seen it until I could actually recall and register seeing the bird!

It was a pretty incredible first day in the Falklands – I feel like, as well as starting to get set up for going out on the boat, I had two proper Falkland experiences right off the bat: I saw loads of penguins and we got bogged. I think it still counts as bogged when you’re stuck in sand rather than mud / peat – we were in a car that wasn’t moving because of the elements!! As well as all that, I was also really excited to finally be here. It felt like I could finally start getting stuck into this project – I mentioned in the last post that being able to run through the DNA barcoding process before leaving Aberdeen made me feel like I actually knew what I was talking about when it came to the technique, I felt the same about being here. So far, I had just been reading about my project in the literature, but now I could actually start to collect samples, and look at the species, and (most importantly) be able to look at my project title and objectives and start to consider what I can do and how I can go about doing it. On that positive and optimistic note, I will leave this post here! I’m writing this on a Thursday evening, and if I start talking about the first sampling trip, I will not want to get up tomorrow morning!! The fact that it’s dark and cold now makes it hard enough as it is!

How to Plan a PhD Field Season (and then change everything about it)

Before I arrived in the Falklands I had such plans about keeping this blog up to date. As you can see (considering I’ve now been here over 2 months), that did not happen, however, I will make a couple of excuses in that I have been busy, and the internet is fairly limited here (definitely when compared to when I was writing this blog in NZ, and even when you compare it to Skomer). Adding to that comment, I think that I will add photos to the posts at a later date (read – when I’m back in the UK), because I think the photos would not only take a long time to upload to the site, but also use up quite a bit of the internet allowance! I was planning for the first post to be more Falklands-centric, but as I’ve now got to page 4 of this document, the first post will more be looking at actually getting to the Falklands. I’ll try to be quicker with the next post (which will possibly be more interesting)! Now with the disclaimers out of the way…

In my interview for this PhD project, one of the things I was asked was how flexible I was with plans changing, and weather I was able to cope with that sort of thing. I think I answered quite honestly, and said that, although I much prefer to have a plan in place, I am able to cope with that changing – I can deal with plans changing far more easily than not having a plan at all. This attitude was probably both helped by, and in part formed by when I went interrailing with my friend Lisa at 17 – I kept a diary then, so I know that on the first day, storms meant trains were  delayed and we were on plan E and over 4 hours delayed before we got to our first destination, and then by the end of the first city, train strikes in the next one meant that the entire route had to be re-planned, but that there were also still some key dates we needed to be in certain places for. After starting the PhD at the beginning of August, we were talking about the dates for my first visit to the Falklands relatively early on, though we possibly left booking the flights slightly later than maybe we should have done. The flight I would be travelling down on was an MOD flight, going from Brize Norton to the Falklands, and as such there are a limited number of seats, but also wait-list seats. With the general consensus being that, so long as you were in the first 10 wait list people, you were more or less guaranteed a seat on your chosen flight, this just wouldn’t be confirmed until shortly before the flight itself. Although not quite the certainty we had ideally wanted for the first trip (probably more on my side than anyone else’s – this is the sort of journey where I won’t be convinced that I’m actually going until I’m on the flight going there), as I was number 8 on the list, we decided to go ahead and book my flight for the 16^th January. This was all booked over a month before I was meant to travel, so I was able to enjoy wintery times in Aberdeen (more snow than expected) and Austria (less snow than expected) over the Christmas period, while also preparing and sorting things out for the trip. I was quite excited about the potential of being able to see penguins on my birthday (end of January).

Although I was definitely very excited about travelling to the Falklands, I will admit that there was a very stressful side to this – mainly in the fact that I had (or so I thought) only a week back in Aberdeen to get everything packed and sorted to go, while also figuring a few things out in the laboratory first. I had had to order a new hold back to click and collect when I got back to Aberdeen (my faithful ‘body bag’ that I got in my first year of uni was more or less given up now), and there were a few other things that were falling apart, such as trainers, that needed to be replaced before travelling. I had a flight booked from Aberdeen to London (to avoid the train strikes in the UK), and then a coach booked from the airport to my aunt and uncle in Oxford (much closer to Brize Norton than London). Things were more or less packed, bar a few things that I still needed to find. Despite the very quick turn around time, things were falling into place. The main thing I was very conscious of was the fact that my departure date from Aberdeen was rapidly getting closer (Friday), and I didn’t actually have my flight to the Falklands (planned for Monday) confirmed yet. Times like these make me grateful for my paranoia and tendency to assume the worst sometimes, as by Wednesday, I decided I needed to follow up on this. I got my answer back from the Falklands very quickly, but it was not the answer we were hoping for (in an email subjected “no place on 16th”). In a turn of event that surprised everyone, January flights were overbooked, so no one on the waitlist was going to be able to travel on those flights. The earliest flight we could get a seat confirmed for me for was the 6^th February. After a quick look at flights going the other route (via South America in a journey that – when I looked it up – would take over 43 hours over 4 flights, not counting the journey from Aberdeen to London), we decided that the flight on the 6^th would be the one to go for. I was, admittedly, a bit disappointed by the delay (no penguins on my birthday anymore), though now that it has happened – and that I did make it down on the 6^th February – I don’t mind it so much. The delay did mean that I was able to properly spend some time in the labs in Aberdeen and go through the general processes and techniques that I will have to use to DNA barcode my samples once I get them back from here. If nothing else (as I’m sure I will have to go through the learning process again in July), going through the steps means that when people ask me about the technique, I do actually have some knowledge of how the process works, rather than having to rely completely on remembering what I’ve read in the literature. I was also able to celebrate my birthday with a day out in Stonehaven with my Aberdeen office friends. It was a frustrating delay, with a lot of last-minute re-arranging, but I think things ended up falling into place quite nicely.

Fast forward the three weeks, and I was in Oxford preparing to travel. During this period, there had been an incidence at the Royal Mail which meant that post from the UK was not being sent overseas – including to the Falklands. This meant I was acting as a temporary one-time courier for some people at SAERI as I was (fingers crossed) definitely going to arrive in the Falklands before any post did. The MOD flight is very generous with luggage allowance, though as commercial flights are less so, my uncle ended up receiving the various packages so I wouldn’t have to worry about the weight of (and potential damage to) a couple of fluorescent aquarium lights, a laptop and laptop docking system on the first leg of the journey. I did have to consider the space and weight these would add beforehand, so got creative with placeholders, which luckily did all pay off. Something that the MOD website is very clear on is that you have to arrive, at minimum, 4 hours before your flight is going to take off, or you will most likely be denied travel. My flight was scheduled for departure around 1am, but (because there had to be a few more things to go wrong), when I checked the website on the day before my flight (day I had to arrive at the airport), I spotted that my flight had been delayed by 5 hours. Not a promising start (and enough to make me paranoid), but it was still scheduled to go, which was the most important thing. Another thing to note on the website was that there was a heating problem at the airport terminal, and to prepare warm layers for that. I was travelling with a sleeping bag in my hand luggage (as recommended), but I think a part of me had already decided that I would not be taking that out of the bag quite so early on in the journey.

Despite the GPS trying to take us to Brize Norton via a back entrance (that, as it is an army base, is not open to the public and so should not be the suggested GPS route), we did find the main entrance, so I was able to start checking in for my flight. As you enter BN, you are essentially given a personnel pass with clearance that varies depending on who you are, and reason for travel (military definitely have different clearance, and I think their families do to). These were either yellow or orange, though we couldn’t quite figure out who got which colour (this was discussed during the wait as we didn’t really have a huge amount else to talk about!!). Some people had their picture printed on (I did not), but that seemed to be due to a printer issue rather than clearance level. Interestingly, people from the Falklands who were just travelling home did not need a pass. The website was not lying about the heating issue – it was freezing in the terminal. There was a rumour going around that the heating was stuck with the AC on that, while I’m not 100%  sure if that was the case, it definitely wouldn’t surprise me if it was. What added to the cold was the fact that the automatic door at the entrance to the terminal was stuck open. Baring in mind that it was night time at the beginning of February (according to my phone, -3 degrees), the terminal was cold enough that everyone was wearing all the layers they had, and you could definitely see your breath. With the group I was sitting with, we took it in turns to go to the toilets, which whether or not they actually had working heating, were considerably warmer than the rest of the terminal!! I think we all got called up to go through security earlier than they normally would just because everyone was so cold. We had to go up alphabetically by surname, so I was in the last lot to go through, but it was nice to be marginally warmer on the other side! Going through security itself was interesting, as my bag seemed to be largely made up of things that needed to come out at security (especially considering my post for SAERI). I also set off the metal detector for no apparent reason, and in all honesty, an army base is not really where I wanted to set that off! Even with a hand scanner, we couldn’t figure out what was setting it off, so they let me through.

Now through to the other side, we had more waiting. I sat with the same people (and coincidentally, the 6 of us were spread out over the same 3 rows on the aeroplane), and I think we were going a bit loopy while we tried to stay awake in the early hours of the morning. At one point we were definitely talking about how inviting the children’s soft play area looked, and this varied between it looking like a fun way to pass the time, and that it looked like a far more comfortable area to rest than where we were sitting. I think it was possibly around half past 4 in the morning when we started getting on the plane – the walk out made more painful by having to remove all head gear – but it was definitely nice to sit in the seat and know that I wouldn’t have to move for a while. Although I didn’t really sleep on the flight, it was nice to be able to rest, especially after having been awake all night. It took a while to shake off the chill though, and I think we were in Cape Verde before I warmed up (at which point I overheated because we were queuing up under the clear skies and sunshine). The flight stops in Cape Verde as a point to refuel and change crew. Weirdly, despite having gone through military airport security before getting on a plane for over 5 hours, we did have to go through security at CV, which meant that most of the 2-hour layover was spent getting the 50-odd of us through the one open security scanner. Luckily, we were allowed to keep all liquids, providing we could show we were happy to drink it. Given the warmth (and UK winter layers I had), I was extremely happy to show that, yes, both my water bottles definitely contained water (or at least a drink I was happy to consume – it was water). As much as anything else, I enjoyed the stopover for the brief variety it added to the scenery outside the aeroplane window. I’ve never been on a journey before where the view is so consistently just water.

On the next, much longer, leg, I got very excited when I could see Brazil faintly on the horizon out the window! Not only was it the first time I’d actually seen any part of South America, but it was something other than water! Surprisingly, there were actually screens on the back of seats, and a few options of things to watch. Weirdly on long flights though, I much prefer to listen to things than watch (especially when I’m going on little sleep), but it was nice to have the option from time to time. I’d forgotten how long travel gets sometimes, though I didn’t really start thinking as much about it until the last 5 hours of the flight (so second half of the second leg), mainly because my brain liked to point out “if you hadn’t had the delay you’d be there by now”. The flight did make it, and as it was still daylight, we could enjoy our first sight over the islands as we came into land at Mount Pleasant. It was at this point that I remembered that I had not finished all my snacks, and that my apples might not be allowed in, but I definitely did not want to throw away fresh fruit (which I had heard was hard to come by. There was some time though, so while we all queued up for passport control (a line I was near the back of, partly because of my seat on the plane, but partly deliberately so I had more time) I ate my very tasty granny smith apple. From where we stood, we could see the bags going around on the luggage belt, and by the time us at the back got nearer the front, the sniffer dog had sniffed them all, and RAF personnel were offering to take our bags off and hand them under the barrier to us to save a bit of time. When I got to the front of the line, it turned out that some part of the system had gone down, so my advanced planning on my visitor permit wasn’t showing up, but they still gave me almost the full length of the original permit I had applied for (as of time of writing, I have got it sorted, and got the permit extended in the last week).

It was quite a relief when I was through all of the security and able to go outside and get on the bus (Penguin Travel) which was going to take me directly to where I would be staying. Mount Pleasant airport is actually a decent distance away from Stanley, and I’d say it took a bit over an hour to get there. Most of the drive was in the dark, so I can’t really comment on the scenery, but I was happy to realise that I was the second person to be dropped off! I haven’t actually worked out how long I was travelling for (and don’t really want to know how many hours I was awake for), but I made it to Jesse’s at about 10:30pm local time. In some ways, like when I travelled to NZ (I have to make that link, given the fact that I still have not changed the name of this blog), it was quite nice to be able to just arrive and go straight to bed rather than stay awake to adjust to the time difference (at this point, 3 hours behind the UK). Because of the delay in arrival, the plan was for me to immediately get into work on arrival, but luckily that did not mean I couldn’t have a few days to get over my sleep-deprived-ness and any jet lag. Since this, which is now essentially just a travel journal, has gone on longer than planned, I will end this at this here and will make a point of getting the next post written and upload as soon as possible (in boring real time updates – I have to do the washing up and make sure everything I need for work is in my bag ahead of Monday / tomorrow morning).

Update

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and for the most part that’s because I didn’t have something relevant to post! How long it’s been is highlighted by the completely different format for writing wordpress articles that I’m still getting used to!! The photo set-up is especially different! Although I have kept the name RhiaNZblog for this site (despite no longer living in NZ), when I have updated, I have kept the theme of the content the same – I have posted about any interesting travels or nature-related work that I was doing. The sudden end to my Skomer updates in 2020 was due to how hectic my last few weeks on the island were. Since then, the only related thing I would have had to talk about was actually returning to Skomer as a weekly volunteer earlier this year (in May 2022). It was amazing to go back to the island, see the birds and bluebells again – and learn that great black backed gulls are capable of holding a grudge! The ones I wrote about swooping me in 2020 were just as enthusiastic to see me again almost 2 full years later. I was honestly thrilled by the fact that the gulls still attacked me (and not the other weekly volunteers – I asked). They might not like me, but they remember me!

The reason for this update (creatively titled) is that as of a month and a bit ago, I have started a PhD at the University of Aberdeen. I am very happy to be getting back into the marine field, having not been able to find a job related to the field since leaving Skomer at the end of August 2020. Despite not being related to the field, I do think that the skills learnt in the job I had between now and then were very useful and would have helped me get this position. As part of my PhD, I will be conducting fieldwork in the Falkland Islands – the current plan is to travel down there in January 2023 for my first field season. As I’ve started the planning for that, I figured it would be worth making a start at getting this blog active again – as doing fieldwork in the Falkland Islands definitely lines up nicely with the content I’ve put here before, so I am hoping to post semi-regularly with a general overview of what I’m working on there, or at least posting nice photos of my explorations!

Until then, please enjoy some photos of some aquatic birds (and a couple of seals) I have seen along Aberdeen Beach – they might not be the most exotic or brightly coloured birds around, but I can’t even begin to tell you how happy I was to be by the sea and have easy access to spots where I can enjoy watching wildlife after being away from the sea for so long!

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  Bar tailed godwit

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  Black-headed gull

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  Guillemot (winter plumage)

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  Grey seal witnessing the familial dispute of a young pied wagtail

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  Aberdeen Beach

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  The familial dispute

Puffling in a Pickle!

So it’s been a while. I have an excuse – probably not a good one, but it’s there anyway. I have been trying to keep a diary while I’m here (interesting days and all that), but then I somehow managed to get about a month behind, so in my free time when I haven’t been reading, baking or mindlessly scrolling through the internet and doing random quizzes, I have been trying to catch up on that rather than doing anything with this. I mention baking because I think I have several baked goods left over from previous bakes, but I also spent some of yesterday afternoon baking biscuits (yo-yos, which are an amazing biscuit I had in NZ) and I baked some bread. I may have done less baking today, but I do have some dried fruit soaking in tea so I can attempt making bara brith. Other activities, along with this, that I have been putting off while trying to catch up on my diary (currently on the 18th August, so getting there), is my cross stitch. I have two here at the moment, one is of a puffin and the other one is mainly a couple of seals, but also has other marine things (dolphins, oystercatchers, shells, etc…) around the seals. I have a one track mind it seems. Anyway, enough of excuses, and on with the INTERESTING things I have been doing.

Since my last post, I think there’s been quite a change over of people (and a lot of people going on and off). A lot of people is all relative, as of Tuesday we now have the 13th person of the year on Skomer! For the most part there have always been 4 people on the island, though that very briefly went down to 2 (Nathan and I), and I suppose even down to none (while Nathan and I went over to the mainland to pick up Sylwia). I hadn’t realised how long it had been since I last posted, sorry about that! About a month after I wrote my last post, Ollie and Emma (Oxnav researchers) arrived on the island, and Alexa was about to leave. Shortly after Alexa left, Sylwia had to leave for a bit to sort out some dentistry issues, and Ollie and Emma came out of quarantine. Ollie and Emma were doing a lot of work with Manxies, and I was able to help out a bit with that, which was great fun (more on that later). Ollie and Emma left the Island on Friday, Sylwia came back on Sunday and we were joined by Ed (a volunteer) on Tuesday. It’s just as well he arrived on Tuesday, as otherwise it might have been a while for him – we are currently being hit by Storm Ellen, not that that stopped us from doing a seawatch all morning and spend the afternoon doing rocky shore surveys. It’s quite funny that at the moment we’ve got two people in quarantine, but they can’t be quarantined together, so we’re all living in separate sections. Both wardens are down at North Haven, one in the wardens quarters, and one in the researchers quarters. The other two of us are up at the farm – I’m still in the voles quarters (joined by Harri, the Skomer vole, who has started to see if I’m edible) and Ed in the researchers quarters.

Skomer team eating ice cream

Skomer team eating ice lollies

Despite saying at the end of the first paragraph that I was going to start talking about what I’ve been doing, I then proceeded to go on for quite a bit more and still not say anything I’ve done. SO. If any of you are worried about the title of this post referring to an actual puffling in peril, fear not! Puffling in a Pickle was the title of a book my sister and I both loved when we were younger, and while trying to think of some sort of pun or play on words for this posts title, I realised I hadn’t used the book for a post title so went with that. This time when I mention pufflings, you’ll be happy to know, that I have actually seen them now. Shortly after my last post I was able to see pufflings. Nathan and Sylwia had gone out a few times to check on the pufflings on the isthmus, and to measure their wings and weigh them to monitor their growth, so one afternoon Alexa and I were able to join in. If I remember correctly, this was done on the Sunday after our final puffin occupancy watch (which had been on the Wednesday). Despite the relatively short amount of time passing between these two events, when Nathan, Alexa and I were checking the puffin burrows in the occupancy plot we only found a couple of pufflings! We did get an adult manxy as well, that was definitely a bit confused, so that bird was quickly placed back in the comfort of its burrow. The pufflings we did find, both in the occupancy plot and on the isthmus itself, varied hugely in size. We had a few that looked more or less like the adult puffins, but with darker faces and a small black beak, while other individuals were still balls of fluff! At the young age and the ‘ready to fledge’ age, the pufflings look quite sweet. In-between these stages, the pufflings go through their awkward faze. One of the pufflings we found was probably about the same size as my hand, and was very well behaved. Occasionally you’d get a puffling and a puffin in the same burrow, and in those instances you’d have one person hold the adult, and the other measure the puffling. Despite how many pufflings there must have been on the island at one point, they don’t really come out of their burrows very often and when they do, it’s probably right before they fledge. One morning while walking by the Wick, I did see a couple of pufflings peer out of their burrows for a bit. One just had a quick look around, while the other never stayed out for too long but did keep popping in and out of the burrow to get a better look at the outside world!

Puffling at the Wick taking a look at the ‘real world’

The smallest puffling we found!

Me with a puffling

Like my last post, a lot of this post will be talking about chicks. As well as seeing fluffy puffling chicks, I have also been able to do some work with the fluffy manxy chicks. This was mainly done while Ollie and Emma were here, as that was the work they were doing. Every day there were some chicks that needed weighing. Ideally, the weighing was done in the evening (especially as Ollie and Emma often had other manxy work to do with the adults during the night), so I was able to help out with this a few times – as much as it would have been nice to be able to help out daily, it was not quite possible for me to do that and still be awake for some of the other work I needed to be getting on with in the day! I did help with this as often as possible though. The most chicks weighed in one night was 33, so that was pretty cool. The burrows are dotted around North Haven, some around the house itself, others along the researchers path up to the main route, and others either side of the main path down to the isthmus. All of this work was having to be done in red light, as this disturbs the birds the least, and the number of times I missed the start of the researchers path while using the red light is crazy! Some of the plants are dying back a bit at the moment as it gets later in the season, but there’s still a lot of bracken and ragwort around. Although they were also doing work with the adults following the chick weighing, most of the times I stayed later, the adults didn’t come in until EVEN later, so I had to leave before that work was done. The was another afternoon a couple of weeks ago where we were weighing and ringing the manxy chicks, which was amazing! Since we were working in daylight, it also means I was able to get pictures of the chicks, which was pretty cool! I don’t know how many chicks we weighed that day – I do know that I put a lot of them in the cloth bag to be weighed though. A few of them were proper chunksters (that’s the technical term). There were two that only JUST could be weighed on our scales at 595g each, but then we had one where we had to get another set of scales, as it was just so big! That one was 640g, and if the parents keep feeding it before it sheds all its down, I don’t know how it’s going to get off the ground, even after the brief period of starvation that the chicks go through. The chicks around North Haven had all been checked up on regularly (though we decided to turn off the livestream when getting the manxy chick out of the monitored burrow), but the chicks on the isthmus hadn’t really been checked since they were at egg stage. We did still get a decent number of chicks, though a lot of the burrows were much deeper. Quite often we had to use the ‘technique’ where you get the chick to bite onto your hand so you can get it within reach using the force of their beak. I definitely had one chick that did not want to let go of my thumb. Due to the depth of the burrows, we had to mark a few down as ‘can’t reach’ and we would come back to those later (and dig some more hatches to get to the end of the burrow). I was able to ring one of the chicks, which I was pretty excited about.

Wilbur and I (the smallest chick)

Nathan holding the famous Sir Tom Shearwater (named on Skomer Live)

Let gooo!!

Manxy being weighed

I briefly mentioned in the last paragraph that some work was being done on the adults, and I will say a bit about that here. There’s quite a bit of work going into how manxies navigate, so some of the work being done here was focused on that. On a few evenings, we would go out and collect adults from specific burrows so that we could conduct some displacement experiments on them. In order to get repeat data, ideally we were aiming to get the same birds that had already been monitored earlier in the season, but if it started getting later in the night we’d get slightly less selective with the adults we chose. We tended to get about 6 individuals, and the others would put a GPS device on their backs. We would then carry the adults to the Wick, and release them there one at a time. Once the birds were released, we’d race back to North Haven and see if any of them had returned. The number that returned each night varied, and would depend on the weather – specifically the amount of light. You could pretty much guarantee that if the moon had come out, and was really bright between us leaving and returning to North Haven there would be fewer birds that had returned. They would return on subsequent nights, so once the GPS tracker was retrieved, Ollie could upload the traces onto his computer and see what route the manxies used to get back to North Haven, and whether it varied for the individual.

I don’t have any pictures from the displacements, so here’s an out-of focus close-up of a manxie I found on the path one morning and took to an artificial burrow.

On a couple of occasions we have gone out to ring storm petrels. These have definitely been late nights – generally getting back to the farm around 3 o’clock in the morning. I did see noctilucent clouds after the first ringing, so that was cool! To get to the stormy ringing site we have to carefully walk (read: bum slide) down one of the slopes to get to a spot near their nests. We have to set up the mist net, and then wait. I can’t remember how many stormies we caught (and released) on the first night, but on the second night we got 42 birds! We actually ran out of rings, and had to release one of the 42 birds unmeasured as it wasn’t a re-trap and we had no way of recording which individual it was. With these birds, we once again were measuring their wing size, getting some general information about the health of the bird, weighing them (when the scales worked) and then releasing them. Any new individuals would be ringed. I know I mentioned ringing a puffling chick earlier, but chronologically, I was able to ring a couple of the storm petrels the second evening we were catching them. Having storm petrels be the first bird I’ve ringed is pretty special. Since these and the manxy, I have also been able to ring a robin, which brings my ring count up to 4. I wasn’t really expecting to be able to do something like that here, so I’m pretty happy with that total! Although the first night I didn’t ring any birds, I did release a lot of them after they were processed. This may seem like a very odd comment, but storm petrels smell really good. To be completely unhelpful, the best way I can think to describe them is “like manxies, but stronger”. I wish I had some way of recording smell (my best bet at the moment would be walking off the island with one of the bags they’re collected from the mist net in, but I can’t do that). They are very dainty little birds, with long, thin legs which must be great on the sea but, like manxies, they’re not brilliant on land. When we released them, the storm petrels would either fly off your hand, or flap their way up the rocks so that they could take off from the highest point possible. Lovely little birds! (I will just say quickly – most of the work was done with red light unless something specific needed to be checked, and I have edited the brightness of the photos so that the birds can be seen more clearly).

Two storm petrels!

Storm petrel, showing the feet

Hard at work

The view while working on stormies

Noctilucent clouds from the farm

In the last month I have been able to do some rocky shore work which I have definitely enjoyed! I love doing the seabird work, but it’s nice to be able to do some work that I know inside out. Obviously, there are some differences with the species that you find here compared to what you find around Bangor (depending on the northern or southern extreme of the organism) and there are also differences with Cork, but for the most part I can pretty confidently identify a lot of the species on the rocky shore. The first bit of work, which Nathan helped me with, was specifically focused on barnacles and a couple of the gastropod species. The barnacle work was the easiest barnacle work I’ve done in a while – we didn’t have to identify the species in front of us (that was just for fun) we needed to take 20 photos of 5x5cm quadrats of barnacles at the high, mid and low shore height. For this, my ‘marine knowledge’ mainly came in handy for locating the shore heights, which I could work out by the dominant algae species on the shore. They’re good like that. The next bit, with the gastropods, was great fun! We had 3 minutes to find as many individuals of two topshell species as we could – Gibbual umbilicalis (purple topshell) and Phorcus lineatus (previously Monodonta, or the toothed topshell). It felt a bit like a scavenger hunt, and the 3 minutes went by so quickly! These then needed to be measured at the widest point. This work was done on both North Haven and South Haven beaches – NH is definitely the shore that’s easier to access! We had to wait until the next spring tides for the next bit of work. There’s a list of species that have been seen on Skomer and Skokholm, so this time Ed and I set out to assess the abundance of these species using the SACFOR scale. There’s a good reason that SACFOR data is usually described as ‘semi-quantitative’, and that’s because it doesn’t really give the best indication of the species abundance on a shore. You have to find each of the species and look for where on the shore they’re most abundant. Once you’ve worked this out, you can assign the species a value on the scale (Super-abundant, Abundant, Common, Frequent, Occasional and Rare). It is possible to extend this scale slightly (ESACFORA, adding Extremely abundant and Absent onto either end), or even reduce it to the ACFOR scale. The scale records the species at its highest abundance, and the way of quantifying this varies depending on the type of organism (and how many of that species a small area of the environment could realistically support). To be fair, it is a quick way of surveying the shore, and does give you some indication of the occurrence of the species. This can be done for any organisms, from the different algaes, to the sessile species (like barnacles and anemones) and even some of the mobile organisms (topshells and periwinkles). I do find the work quite fun, which is just as well as I think yesterday we were working in 50kmph winds, which did make things interesting. As the wind was supposedly coming from the south (though it didn’t always feel like it) we were only able to sample North Haven. If the wind drops enough, we might try and get South Haven done on Sunday, but I’m not optimistic. The spring tides are coming to an end, so in a few days the tide won’t drop as low. Unfortunately, due to the weather, we already were unable to sample the species found at the lower extreme of the shore (mainly kelp species). The highlight of the rocky shore work, for me, was finding a new crab species! Obviously by that I mean ‘new to me’, but considering I did my Masters thesis on crabs (and other decapod crustaceans, I just mainly got crabs) I was pretty excited to find a different species! I was so engrossed in trying to figure out what it was that I accidentally over-proved my bread (which was rising properly for the first time) and ended up with a flat loaf. I did find out what the crab was though – Xantho insicus.

South Haven (and a small audience)

North Haven (and a larger audience)

The new crab!!

Beadlet anemone

Limpet covered rock

I have been to South Haven on one other occasion – it’s not the easiest place to get down to, more of a scrabble than down to where we do the storm petrels (with more burrows), though on one foggy day, Nathan and I went down to SH to do a beach clean. It was sad, yet satisfying to do. Over the winter an insulated container with food washed up into South Havenm which is why I’ve sometimes been out making and checking boxes with wax blocks to give an indication of whether there are rats on the island (I might have mentioned it in a previous post). As it was an insulated container, it was lined with foam, which has undergone a faster version of the erosion process that turns boulders into sand – some bits of foam were very rounded, which was interesting in a slightly disturbing way (as it means that there are smaller bits of foam floating around). We were able to shift some of the smaller bits of metal, though some are quite well wedged under rocks. I was also able to pull out as much of an old fishing pot rope off the beach as possible. In some places it was completely trapped under rocks and boulders, so in those places I had to use a hacksaw to break it up, but the good news is that none of the bits of rope should be over a metre now, so some improvements there? There were two interesting things that came out of this trip. The first is that I found a gannet skull, which was unexpected. The second was that, since it had recently been very windy (it’s a recurring theme) there were loads of by-the-wind sailors washed up. I had not seen these before, but have read enough up on random sea creatures that I was able to identify them (which isn’t saying too much – there’s not much else they can be). For those who don’t know, the by-the-wind sailor is a Cnidarian (like jellyfish) and is actually a colony of hydroids that use a ‘sail’ to let the wind blow them around the oceans. Their closest relative would be the larger (and more poisonous) Portugese man-o-war (though I wouldn’t reccomend picking up this one either, as it can also sting, and reactions vary between people). An interesting fact about these is that, depending on the direction of the ‘sail’ on their body, these are either ‘right handed’ or ‘left handed’ colonies.

By-the-wind sailor

View up to the isthmus (can you see the route down?)

My gannet skull

This will probably highlight how long it’s been since I uploaded anything here, but a little while ago (before I was staying up late to help with manxies), I was staying up late to try and spot the comet Neowise. Funnily enough, there’s not a lot of light pollution on Skomer and no mountains blocking the view north which theoretically makes here a good spot for star gazing. I say theoretically mainly because recently we have had a lot of fog. I know that Skomer is in Wales, and that Wales is known for rain, but we really have not had many clear nights! Despite that, I was able to see Neowise 4 or 5 times I think? It definitely got fainter the longer it was in the sky, and moved more towards the west. There was one evening towards the end of the time when it was visible where I’d given up seeing the comet that night and just started taking pictures of the sky, and then spotted the comet in the top corner of my photo! Along with seeing Neowise, I was also able to just do some general stargazing, and so also spotted several shooting stars, the International Space Station and my favourite constellation, Delphinus. Astronomy may have been the first area of science I properly got into, but I’ll find away to get marine biology in there if I can! Unfortunately, recent cloudy nights have made it impossible to see the meteor shower, though we have had some thunder storms (none hugely impressive, but always nice to see). It was pretty special to be able to see the comet multiple times though.

Neowise

Neowise over the farm

Spot the comet!!

Delphinus

Before I end, I am going to do a ‘general island update’. In the time since my last post, there have been major changes in the animals found here, and it has become much quieter. The puffins and other Auks (razorbills, guillemots) all left around mid-July. There was the occasional bird or two hanging around (and have been seen as recently as last week), but for the most part those have either been on the island, or doing a rapid in and out of the burrow to do a quick feed. The kittiwakes have also pretty much left. I was doing my productivity until a week ago when the last breeding site was absent of any chicks! It’s a bit weird being around the places that used to be full of birds. The Wick especially is very quiet and still in comparison to how it was before. The manxies and fulmars are the main birds still hanging around – the manxies we normally see at night or while doing a seawatch, but we can still see the fulmars when we go to the cliffs. I saw them quite a bit when I was still doing my herring gull productivity, as there were quite a few nesting at Tom’s House and the Amos. Now I mainly see the fulmars when I’m around the Wick, High Cliff or Garland Stone. I did enjoy seeing the fulmar chicks – they are basically just balls of fluff (which seems to be the case for a lot of these birds). I have a favourite picture of one of their chicks as well – it’s playing with a feather! For a few weeks at the end of July and beginning of August, the farm had a ‘pet’, a racer pigeon Alexa named Jo. Jo would hang around, mainly outside my door (especially when the weather was bad) and would let us know if he ever wanted feeding by closely following us, or miming pecking. Apparently it’s an annual thing that a few will stop over on Skomer, so there is food for them here when they do. There was another down at North Haven for a while that was called Marcel. Finally, I technically started writing this post yesterday, but as of earlier today I have an end date for my stay on Skomer – I will only be here until the end of this month (weather may alter the actual day that I leave), and this is due to Trust regulations on the number of people that can be on the island at any one time during COVID-19, and this is divided between Trust personelle and researchers. This will not be my last post that I will make about Skomer (and the next one will probably be a bit sooner, all things considered) as I still have quite a bit to talk about, but figured I should probably stop now as I have not had my tea yet, and it’s currently 9:30pm – that’s very late for me! This may be my penultimate post about Skomer, though I guess I will see how I get on with the next one when I come to write it!

Kittiwake chicks getting big!

Puffin trying to steal my camera

I was in the way, apparently

I interrupted a fulmar gossip session

Fulmar close up

Chick with a feather!

Kittiwake chicks of all sizes

Jo, looking indignant

Pufflings and kittiwakes and gull chicks, oh my!

So since my last post I’ve basically been doing more of the same – bird stalking. It’s taken me a while to think about what to write for this next post, as I’m still doing kittiwake productivity (all seven sites now), as well as herring gull and great black-back gull productivity and some of the land counts for the full island counts. The second round of whole island counts is just for the kittiwakes and fulmars, as they would have still been settling in the last time we counted. I think in the time since I did my last post, we’ve don our second (of 3) puffin occupancy watches and there was volunteers week! Volunteers week didn’t really change anything that’s going on here, but I did fill in something that the wildlife trust put online with my face on (I haven’t been able to find the actual post, so I can’t direct you towards that, if you’re interested), and I also did an interview for Pure West Radio, They do have podcasts of past episodes, so if you’re interested in that, I believe it went out on the 5th of June, and it’ll be the episode that was probably between 11-12? I haven’t listened to it, but I believe it was meant to go out at 11:15am (pre-recorded, I think I was out of signal and by South Stream – between High Cliff and Captain Kites – when it went out).

OK, I just wanted to put some pictures here – here’s loads of puffins flying by

And a wood pigeon I found in our bracken store – we both surprised the other!

Puffins at the Wick

The main thing that’s different since the beginning of June is the number of chicks on the island. OK, so we already had the razorbill and guillemot chicks (though Alexa spends far more time with those than I do), and my gull chicks were also out and about. We now have more of the terrestrial chicks about, I believe my messy swallows (compost loos) even fledged today. Also, and something that I have to pay far more attention to, the kittiwake chicks have been hatching!! Out of all the gull chicks, these look the most different. The chicks for the great black back gulls, lesser black back gulls AND herring gulls all look the same (grey with black spots), which can be frustrating with my herring gull productivity. I was working on that earlier today, and there are lessers and herring gulls nested close together and now that the chicks are more mobile it’s a nightmare to try and figure out which chicks belong to which nest within the same species, and then trying to distinguish between the different gulls? I’m making an educated guess based on proximity to nests and size of chicks. I saw 4 together earlier between two nests – gulls aren’t going to have more than 3 chicks, so the two larger ones were slightly closer to the lessers nest, and the two slightly smaller ones – all four were different sizes, of course – were ever so slightly closer to the herring gull nest. That’s the best I can do on that!

Three great black back gull chicks

This one finally coming (also GBBG) out in the open

GBBG not happy with the weather

Three herring gull chicks – getting quite big!

Two herring gull chicks of different sizes and from different nests

The best photo of herring gull chicks I have – not in my study plot though!

Swallow chicks in the compost loos last week!

Anyway, of got distracted by gull chicks. The kittiwake chicks are white when the first hatch (spotting the first one made me so happy), and as they grow bigger they get greyer. I will need to check on the size classing for kittiwakes so I can record accurately – as some of the chicks are definitely no longer small. I have seven different productivity plots for the kits (to be counted from 4 different spots), so it takes me a bit of time to get through them all. I’m probably not doing them quite as often as I should be, but we’ve had some terrible weather days (including very thick fog where I can’t even see the other side of the post, let alone what a kittiwake was in its nest), so I’m doing them as often as I can. Each of the sites have between 40 and 120 nests, though I’ll generally spend about an hour and a half on any one plot. It’s getting easier now the chicks have hatched, as not all of them seem to like being sat on all the time, so the adults have to move more often, giving me better views of the nests! When I’m not doing kittiwake productivity, I’m probably doing herring gull or great black back gull productivity. The GBBG productivity has become more enjoyable (far less stressful) but more time consuming now the chicks have hatched. I now need to find a spot to perch and watch the area around the nest site through a telescope to see if I can spot the chicks. This would be a lot easier if most of the nests weren’t surrounded by bracken. I’ve probably spent about 10 hours watching the nests in this way, and I’ve spotted chicks at 7 of my productivity nests (and 3 of not-my productivity nests, but let’s ignore those ones). Up until today, I was probably getting about one nest (with chicks) per hour, but today has been really hot, so I reckon most chicks found a spot in the shade and stayed there. I did see one, not moving and panting, so at least I got one! I do think that at least 5 of my nests have failed this year, so while I still have to get a closer look at those, you could say I’ve possibly covered 13 of my 25 nests?

Kittiwakes nesting

The first chick I spotted!

Getting bigger!

One kittiwake has lost its nest to a razorbill (a species that does not built nests, but has the occasional bird in search of comfort)

Turns out, the best way to see into kittiwake nests is to have a peregrine wander by!

Mew Stone on a normal day

Mew Stone last Wednesday

Now. Onto the chicks that I’m sure more people care about than the ones I’ve already mentioned. PUFFLINGS! Probably the best named animal-baby – one of my favourite books when I was younger was ‘Puffling in a Pickle’ (a wonderful title my Mum found in a charity shop), so seeing a puffling is something I’ve wanted to do for a LONG time. I’m very sad to say that I’m yet to see a puffling!! Most of the work done on that is at North Haven (where the wardens live) so I think they just get on with it when they have time, so I’m probably in some random spot down a cliff counting birds. Doing more work (read: some work) with the pufflings and more with the manxies is the something that I plan to keep bringing up, as I would love to do more with them. I’m someone who absolutely hates pestering people, and will try to avoid doing anything that may come across as pestering, but this is something I want to do badly enough to ignore that! While I may not have SEEN pufflings, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of them – puffins with fish. All of the Auks bring fish back to their chicks, rather than regurgitating it (as the gulls, and many other birds, do). This, of course, makes them the target of larger, lazy birds like gulls and jackdaws that will target the birds with fish in the hopes of a quick, easy meal. Due to this kleptoparasitism (that word is a nightmare to spell), the puffins tend to land as close to their burrow as possible, and run the remaining distance (if there is any) which makes getting pictures – especially GOOD pictures – of them with fish very difficult. I have spent far too long trying to get pictures of puffins with fish, and I am happy to say that I have now got a decent number! I need to try and get more pictures of the other Auks with fish, but this is more difficult as they nest on cliffs, not in burrows, so I can’t get as close. As of today I now do have a picture of at least one individual of each Auk with fish, so that’s something. By that I mean I have pictures of one razorbill with fish, and one guillemot with a fish. I’ve seen more, but either haven’t had my camera on me (guillemots) or they’ve been too fast (razorbills).

Puffin with fish

The mad dash to the burrow

Razorbill with fish

Guillemot with a fish (the carry fish differently to the other Auks)

Possessed puffin with fish

Somewhat focused flying puffin with fish

Although some of the bird chicks are only just starting to hatch (kittiwakes) or haven’t hatched yet (fulmars, manxies), some of the chicks are already starting to leave! Obviously we’ve had some of the terrestrial fledglings around for a while, but we’re not really monitoring those, so we’ll make a note of fledglings if we see them, but their breeding season was covered in the breeding bird surveys and we don’t have to monitor specific nests like we do for the sea birds. The razorbills and guillemots were the first sea birds to lay eggs, and they also have (I think) the shortest time between egg hatching and chick jumping out of all the birds we’re monitoring. I believe the time to fledgling is somewhere between 2 and 3 weeks (closer to 2). The other night, Alexa and I went over to the Amos (Alexa’s second home to monitor the guillemots) to watch some of the jumplings. Since the jump just as it gets dark, all of my photos of this are TERRIBLE, but I tried. When the chicks are old enough, the father will call them down into the sea and then stay with them until they are old enough to survive on their own. Since the chicks can’t fly yet, they have to jump down into the sea. Some of the birds here nest on ledges that aren’t really over the sea (even at high tide, which is when we went down) so those chicks will have a bit of a walk before they can jump. We saw quite a few chicks jump (fall) off the cliff and land with a very big splash, and then there were just these tiny white dots swimming around with the adult guillemots or razorbills. I got properly invested in the fate of one of the chicks. It moved down into a crack in the rock and, due to the steepness, there was no way it could get back up to the guillemot colony. It clearly was not happy about this situation, and just stood for a while, peering over the edge every now and then. It eventually decided that, NO, it absolutely did NOT want to jump off the cliff (which, fair enough chick), so tried to run back up the very steep crack. It tried this several times, bouncing further and further back every time. Eventually, it bounced so far back that it fell off the edge of the crack, bounced off a rock a bit further down and then splashed down into the sea. Its father followed right after, far more gracefully. It’s probably just as well that one fell, there was no way it was going to jump!

Curious guillemot chick

Small blur in water with adult blur (of the razorbill variety)

Guillemot blurs getting ready to jump

I’ve been spotted

Small blurs of the guillemot variety

One thing that happened recently that I really enjoyed (though it would be better if this sort of thing didn’t happen) was finding a manxy! So we only really see the manxies if we go for a wander at night with a red light torch (which I’m doing less and less – monitoring is tiring), though we do see evidence of unfortunate manxies that were out too late or got pulled out of their burrows by gulls. Normally these are just left over wings, but sometimes its a whole manxy, which is even sadder to see. It was about a week ago now, and on one of the very foggy days, and I was doing some scything (when we can’t see birds to monitor, clear some of the paths which are getting very overgrown with just 4 of us) and I passed by Moorey Meer. I tend to go in there whenever I pass the hide at least once in a day – originally this was because there were often interesting birds to see there, but now it’s mainly lesser black back gulls, but I go in to take pictures of the changing size of the pond. By the end of May, the pond had nearly dried up, but we’ve had a very wet June so it’s more or less full again! Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to have a picture of the pond in the fog, so I went in and didn’t even sit down – just opened one of the windows (I can’t think of the name at the moment) to take a picture. I’m so glad I did – despite it being after noon, there was a live manxy struggling at the edge of the pond! I quickly found a way around the front of the hide and onto the pond (scaring off all the gulls) and went to pick up the manxy – which is something I have been taught how to do properly, just in case anyone was worried, this is absolutely NOT something guests can do. It was so calm, which surprised me, didn’t put up any fight at all – I’m much bigger than a manxy! We have some artificial burrows next to the farm so we can put any live manxies wandering about during the day in, and then they can leave under cover of darkness. In my walk from Moorey Meer to the farm I took so many selfies (most of which just feature the manxy) – they are such beautiful birds, and so soft! I think this one just got a bit wet slimy in the pond (I know it sounds stupid saying a seabird got stuck because it was too wet, but this one was very bedraggled). Manxies also aren’t great on land, so it probably got confused in the fog and then couldn’t take off on the edge of the pond. I’m just glad the lesseres were ignoring it, it must have been there a while! Obviously it’s better if the manxies aren’t out in the day, but it was nice to see one, and to know that I could help one out a bit!

My manxy!!

Me with manxy

More of manxy

Manxy in an artificial burrow

Morrey Meer (and manxy)

Something I, unfortunately, don’t have pictures of (I’ll try next time) is a swim I went on today! I think I’ve mentioned a few times that it’s been really warm today, but when I got back from my gull monitoring today I saw a message from Alexa asking if anyone was up for a swim. This was something I had been thinking of earlier, so I could not have replied quicker to her message! We swam off the bottom of the steps at the welcome point. We didn’t check the tide times (a mistake, in hindsight) and it was low tide on a spring tide. Normally some of the steps are still underwater (making for an easier entry and exit point), but today even the absolute bottom step was above the low water mark. We had to drop off the step (not too far, but still) and into kelp to swim off and the water was still very cold. I definitely needed my neoprene shirt (I don’t have a wetsuit)! Even though it was cold, it was absolutely amazing. We’re probably in the background of todays live camera footage (which we only thought about once we were in), but it was amazing to see the puffins so close! They were very curious and got quite close – though any sudden movement (like turning your head) would startle them, so we had to move very carefully. I took my prescription mask down with me (wouldn’t be able to see anything without it) which meant I could watch the puffins paddling under the water, and occasionally dive down, which made me so happy! I need to take my gopro with me next time, but it isn’t charging well at the moment (very frustrating). Something else that I could see were comb jellies! I have never seen these before (pictures, yes), and I absolutely loved it –  could see their rainbow bioluminescence running along their cilia as they floated by.  I was almost more excited by these than getting close to the puffins – I expected there to be puffins there, I did not expect Ctenophores / comb jellies / sea gooseberries, whatever you want to call them! Hopefully they’ll still be there next time and I can get some footage of them. If I get it, you will definitely see it – or at least photos of it! Getting into the sea was fine, even if a bit cold, getting out at low tide is interesting. The way I got out could only be described as flopping out like an ungraceful seal – and I think that would be an offence to any ungraceful seals! I’m a bit scratched up by barnacles, but it was all good fun. I’m definitely going to check the tides before any potential swims from now on though.

A picture of puffins at North Haven for the sake of putting a picture here!

Also a random oystercatcher chick that tried to hide in the path

I haven’t mentioned this at all in the blog, but I wanted to share the pictures

This doesn’t really fit in anywhere else, but I still want to mention it – since we’ve had more rain recently, there are also loads of toads and frogs about at night! I can no longer leave my room without a torch when it’s dark, or I risk stepping on something. They’ve sometimes been right outside my door as well. We’ve had the occasional film night down at North Haven, and Alexa and I will have to walk very slowly and carefully back to the farm to avoid stepping on any toad (they really do look like rocks unless they move sometimes). I’ve also seen a glow worm (which is, of course, a beetle) outside my kitchen, and hopefully I’ll see more at some point! Considering I had no idea what to write when I first started this post, I’ve managed to talk about quite a lot. It’s amazing what you can find to talk about when technically I haven’t really done anything different than I wrote about in my last post! I think I’ll wrap this up here so I can be well-rested for tomorrow (no prizes for guessing what I’ll be doing).

My glow worm!

Colourful frog!

Colourful toad!

Toad sneaking around just outside my room

Toad lurking RIGHT outside my bedroom door!

 

 

Bird Stalkers Not-So-Anonymous

As the bird breeding progresses the more of what we’re all doing looks like stalking. I spent probably way to long trying to think of a good 1984 reference (beyond the obvious ‘Big Brother is watching PUFFINS’), but going through quotes saved as part of IB English classes didn’t provide any good ideas. I ended up going with a title that I sent along with pictures to my friends when I was figuring out how to use my telephoto camera lense on our bird feeder (more information than you ever needed on how I came up with a title, but there you go!).

OK, these aren’t birds we’ve had on Skomer, but I figured if I talked about how this post got its name you should get to see some of the many, many photos!

Long tailed tit, great tit and marsh tit, I think?

Crested tit. You have no idea how long it took me to get a photo of this bird

So not a bird, but it’s on the bird feeder

On Monday we had the first of 3 puffin occupancy watches. I probably mention it in one of my last posts, but if not, a few weeks ago I was tasked with making a map of 100 occupied burrows in a marked study site. I also needed to walk around this fragile area with a drill and a sledge hammer to fix any burrow markers, which I found very funny. Anyway, this watch involved at least one of us watching this site all day between 5am and 9pm. We had our ‘first fish’ on the 17th of May, but it’s only recently that we’ve seen multiple puffins bringing in sandeels. During this watch we had a couple of telescopes set up on the plot, and we needed to make a note of any puffins going into burrows with sandeels. I’m really impressed with how the puffins can almost land right in their burrows when they have food – this is to avoid kleptoparasitism, where other birds (around here, gulls and jackdaws) will get the puffins to drop the fish and eat it themselves. The birds hanging around to try and get the puffins food were a very good indicator of when a puffin might have fish just outside your scope view, as they tended to fly towards it. On one occasion, a gull actually pulled a puffin back out of its burrow to steal the fish. I even saw one grab a puffin mid-air and yank it up so that it would drop its fish. While most puffins would land and quickly disappear into their burrow (whether or not we saw fish, we would count this as bringing food to a chick – puffins tend to hang about outside their burrows when they don’t have anything else to be doing), a few would land way off and make their way, slowly or quickly back to their burrow. It’s thought that this is so the predators don’t work out where their burrow (and puffling) are, but it often meant that the puffin would get their fish stolen, or they’d be chased off to avoid this. It also meant a lot of shouting at the puffins to get a move on, and stop standing around from our end. We will have to do this again a couple of times – this time I was lucky enough not to be needed until 7am, we’ll see what happens for the next one!

Puffin burrows! Might have used this one before, not sure… I have limited photos for this!

Puffin at burrow 18 liked fiddling with his number…

Me getting the burrows mapped

Some extra puffins because why not?

That doesn’t look comfortable…

My other recent tasks also seem to involve stalker-like tendencies, but that’s just the time of year it seems – we’re all guilty of it. Both of the wardens have their own productivity plots, and I have a few as well. These are plots that we need to monitor at varying intervals (the wardens plots are daily, I’m glad mine aren’t), and each time we monitor them we need to make a note of nest contents (if we can spot it), adult behaviour (sitting on a nest, incubating, standing by the nest) and how many adults there are. Once the eggs start hatching, we need to make a note of how many chicks there are (and if there are still any eggs in the nest that we can see). We monitor the chicks until they are of fledging age (though apparently many will hand around for a while after, so we don’t have to monitor them until they actually leave). This is a way of monitoring the success of the different breeding birds here, and is particularly important for the different gull species (great black-back gulls, herring gulls and kittiwakes) as all of these species are in decline. I believe it was mentioned in last weeks episode of Skomer Live that it is possible that in 50 years there could be no kittiwakes left breeding on Skomer, which would be very sad. I am responsible for the herring gull productivity, great black-back gull productivity and three of the seven kittiwake productivity plots. If the wonderful Ceris and Catrin (Assistant Warden and Visitor Officer respectively) hadn’t been furloughed, I would only be responsible for the great black back-gulls. Ironically, that’s the one I look forwards to the least, just because it seems to involve a lot more stress than the others (for both me and the gulls). It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just somewhat trickier than the others. The kittiwakes and herring gulls can both be observed from a set spot through a telescope, whereas to see the great black-back gull nest contents you generally have to get right up to the nest which they obviously don’t like. Monitoring all these nests (25 total) also takes me over a significant part of the island and clambering up quite a lot of rocks so it’s physically tiring. I did get to pick the nests that I monitor, which was something. That meant I could avoid a couple that were more difficult to access (for example, down the side of a cliff or only accessible across a large number of fragile occupied burrows). I also avoided gull nests that were more likely to attack me – that hasn’t stopped one pair from attacking anyone who walks along the path near-ish to their nest? Probably just as well we don’t have any visitors at the moment with that pair about!

Great black back gull with chicks!

The chicks are so fluffy!

Herring gull with chick – taken through a telescope, the others weren’t as good

Funnily enough, all the tasks at the moment are bird-related. Early last week we got started on the whole island counts. Normally these counts will include all the cliff nesting bird species, and alternate between razorbills and guillemots each year. As there aren’t that many of us here (that’s an understatement to be sure) we’re not doing the razorbills as planned, as that will mean the boat counts take a lot more time, and next year they will be counting both Auk species. We started with one of the boat counts, as there were going to be a series of calm days. We did manage to get 12 of the 45 sites done in the first day, which we were quite pleased with! The highlight of that trip was definitely seeing harbour porpoises really close to the boat! We ended up having to postpone the rest of the boat counts until this week due to unforeseen boat issues whilst doing our gas run (get empty cylinders off the island and bring full ones back), so the wardens basically only managed to finish off that task yesterday. As much as I enjoyed the boat counts, I didn’t mind not doing the rest yesterday for a couple of reasons – one being that focusing on something through binoculars while bouncing up and down on a boat did make me feel a bit ill, but also because I needed to start my plot counts (more on those in a bit) and starting was delayed because of our puffin watch. As some of the sites around the island can be counted from land, I have helped with that aspect of the whole island counts, and have done 12 of the 18 land counts. This has been done while having way too many things hanging around my neck! I had my binoculars (essential) and 4 different coloured clickers – one each for four of the species, and on the few sites where all 5 species were, remember one, five clickers would have been ridiculous! Finally, for some of the sections I also had my camera out. One section that needed counting didn’t end up having any birds in it, but from where I was counting I found a manxy that really needs to learn how to hide better…

We got our own stalker…

A different side of Garland Stone!

My favourite fulmar nest site on the island

HIDE BETTER

Harbour Porpoise!

This site at South Stream is used for both kittiwake productivity, whole island counts and one of my razorbill study plots

I briefly mentioned study plots earlier – in the first 3 weeks of June I need to count the numbers of razorbills and guillemots at certain sites around the island 10 times. As this all has to be done in 3 weeks, there is a certain time pressure. I’m not supposed to count on consecutive days and I can’t count if it’s too windy (above Beaufort 4) and if it’s too rainy (or rainy at all for guillemots) I can’t count either. There are 7 sites for razorbills, which have to be counted between 8am and 4:30pm, and 4 sites for guillemots, which have to be completed between 8am and 4pm. If all counts aren’t completed in within those times, the whole day can’t count. So far I’ve done one count, and already with the current wind forecasts, I feel like it could end up being quite tight! On the plus side, I can complete the razorbills and guillemots (which all four conveniently overlap with one of the razorbill plots) in one day, so I only need to get 10 good days in 21 (and also find time to do my productivity). I have a feeling I’ll be very relieved on the 22nd June!

Kittiwakes on the Amos

I have to count all the razorbills on the Wick, as well as guillemots in 4 study plots, though this was a particularly windy day, so no counting then!

All the many things I had with me…

I think that covers most of the tasks I’ve been doing that could be considered ‘bird stalking’, other than just general bird watching in general. This is getting harder on Moorey Meer (my favourite pond), which with all the warm days and lack of rain is almost completely dried up! What’s funny about having so few of us on the island is that some birds (mainly the gulls) are more defensive, while the puffins are quite relaxed around us once they get used to us. I was sitting down at the Wick on Sunday trying to get pictures of puffins bringing in sandeels – it’s hard they’re very good at landing right outside their burrows – and after I’d be sitting in the same spot for a while, the puffins came closer and closer. A few would nibble at me, my shorts and my bag – though they’d all run away looking very guilty if they saw me watching! I had to go back to the same area the next day, and some of the puffins did not move at all when I walked by. One with sandeels landed right at my feet to get into its burrow right by them (that I hadn’t noticed), so some of the puffins are accepting me. They have yet to walk over me, and not care at all that I’m there (like they do with one of the wardens), but it’s a work in progress!

What’s left of Moorey Meer

Puffin doing some clearing out before the puffling hatches

Curious puffin!!

Puffin with sandeel!

Puffin with sandeels!

 

 

Island Life

It’s very difficult to keep track of the days of the week at the moment. We don’t really have a huge amount to help us keep track. To be fair, there is Skomer Live every Wednesday, but with the exception of the first episode, I haven’t really been involved in that! I normally manage to have Sundays off, though there have been a few times that for whatever reason we’ve had to work. To be fair, the day doesn’t really matter here when none of us are really going anywhere! There aren’t that many of us on the island at the moment, so it’s even more obvious than it was before that, although we have far more freedom than the majority of people at the moment, we have a different sort of isolation. We all have our own tasks to be getting on with during the day, and the tasks that need two people are more likely to be done by the wardens. At a guess, I think I’ve probably had maybe an hour of social interaction in the last week. I tend to sing along to music quite a lot when working, which I do enjoy. I also have an unusual kitchen-mate – I’m probably the only person who can currently say this – some evenings I am joined by Harri the Skomer vole! He clearly knows a way in and out of my kitchen that I don’t, but since he has left all my food alone, I don’t mind him! It’s amazing to be able to see the endemic vole so close and so frequently.

Harri

Island views – a more ominous sky

View across bluebells to a lighthouse

I know that getting food at the moment is more difficult than usual for everyone, but the way we get our food order is a Process (and yes, it deserves the capital). We’ve recently been able to get Tesco delivery slots – I’m not even going to talk about how we got food before then, that was a nightmare! Due to restrictions on everything, Tesco deliveries have an item limit (and then some of the products have individual limits), so we have to divide the item total between however many of us there are and work things out from there. We’ve got a delivery slot for this coming Monday, which means (weather permitting) we’ll get our food on Tuesday. Our food gets delivered to someone on the mainland, and he brings it down to the jetty in Martins Haven for us, along with our post. Of course, we still have to do social distancing, so the wardens go over in our little RIB boat, and then Mark (the one from the mainland) will have left our food order at the end of the jetty. Once back on Skomer, we carry all the bags of food up the 90 steps and divide at the top (my stuff needs to go to the farm, and the wardens need to get theirs to North Haven). By the Trust rules, we then have to quarantine our food, just in case there are any traces of the virus on the packaging, so that takes 3 days. Going by that – hopefully next Thursday I’ll be able to enjoy some fresh food! I’ve been rationing my fresh food from the last order, and I think I’ve done it so well that I’ll be able to have a piece of fresh fruit nearly every day until we get the next lot! I have managed to get a few food items from other random websites, which has been very handy.

Our boat out in North Haven

The bottom of the steps, with one of my lovely welcoming signs

A picture of puffins, but the only photo I have where you can see us carrying food up the steps

Those who know me know that I enjoy cooking and baking. It’s just as well really, considering that’s the only way to have interesting things to eat here. I’ve already spoken about our limited food orders – my best purchase has got to be my 10kg of chapatti flour that I got with our last order. Since flour is really difficult to get a hold of at the moment, and we have a limited number of items we can get in any one shop, getting the chapatti flour was well worth the fiver I spent on it! Unsurprisingly, the chapattis and parathas that I have made with this flour are so much better than ones I’ve made before with regular flour. The chapattis were even puffing up, which made me so happy. This big bag of flour does mean that everything I make is wholemeal (I used the last of my plain flour for pancakes a couple of weeks ago, and it was worth it). I have yet to make a personal favourite of mine, ginger nuts, with this new flour – but the chocolate chip cookies and Anzac biscuits have both been pretty tasty! I prefer wholemeal bread anyway, so this new ‘restriction’ hasn’t bothered me at all. This week I ended up making 2 loaves of bread in 2 days. Not because I needed to, I only need the first loaf, but I’ve found you get random cravings for different foods here, so the day after making a nice fresh loaf, I made a loaf of soda bread – which I’ve never made before. Last summer while writing my thesis, my parents and I spent a few days on Cape Clear Island (the southern most point of Ireland – I did my MSc at University College Cork), and whilst we were there we had this amazing oaty soda bread. I found a few recipes and basically just followed the bits of recipes that I felt like and amazingly the loaf did actually work and it’s pretty close to what we had on Cape Clear Island. I’ve been experimenting with new recipes as well, which so far have been successful. As I type this, I have been trying to make dosa mix, which is a process involving 3 ingredients (rice, lentils and fenugreek seeds), and I’ve had to substitute one of them (the type of lentils) and I don’t have one of them (the fenugreek seeds) and then it needs to stay in a warm place for 24 hours (impossible) to ferment. Hopefully I can post this before I’ve tried to make any of the dosas, because that might affect my success rate…

So I’m really pleased with my chapatti, so that means you have to see the picture!

My oaty soda bread

This I just put in for fun – these are not for human consumption. Here are my wax blocks for use in biosecurity

This last week my daily tasks have actually been fairly consistent. I’ve spent the mornings either doing ring re-sightings for lesser black-back gulls or sorting out burrows. The other day I was fixing up my puffin burrows that are going to be used for puffin occupancy. They’re all numbered, but some needed to be put back into the ground or needed a new number, so apparent sorting out the burrows requires a light, cuatious step, a drill and sledgehammer.  I’ll be honest, I enjoyed the sledgehammer – it was very effective at getting the posts into the ground! I did feel bad for any puffins in burrows when I was using the drill or hammer though, I can’t imagine they enjoyed that! My afternoons have been spent wandering around my sections of the island (the farm up to the Garland Stone, around to Skomer Head and then down to Wick, and then the Southern Plateau) looking for nests. We need to try and get an idea of how many breeding birds we have on the island, and ideally we want to locate their nests to keep up with previous years. I’ve mainly been looking for great black-back gull nests (not for surveying like the ones I was looking for before) and oystercatcher nests. I have found one oystercatcher nest – a task which I worked out took me 7 hours of wandering around over the course of several days – though I do have quite a few more sections on my map that are marked as oystercatcher territories. For some of the pairs, that’s probably the best I can do as they like to nest in random spots in the bracken, and I’m always cautious about walking around off-path more than I have to!

Short-eared owl that follows me from the farm almost to Garland Stone

My oystercatcher nest!!

A puffin picture I’m really pleased with that I took while looking for nests

In the evenings I have been working on puffin occupancy. We’re still yet to have our ‘first fish’, but ideally I need to have 100 survey burrows within the study area, so that’s what I’ve been spending several hours looking for most evenings this week. I did manage to get my 100th burrow yesterday morning! There was one particularly annoying puffin that stayed outside one burrow, and defended it from others for over an hour, but as it never went inside I couldn’t count it as an occupied burrow. The puffins are quite a lot of fun to watch. I did see one get dragged out of another burrow by its ear (kind of – one puffin was dragging the other with its foot holding onto the side of the others head). They provide good entertainment, even if they don’t do exactly what I’ve needed them to do. I also seem to get a surprising number of non-puffins hanging about the burrows, including (but not limited to) a pair of choughs, several jackdaws, so many rabbits and a great black-back gull that scared all the puffins off for at least a quarter of an hour. For a bit of variation, one afternoon I wandered around the Isthmus (bit of land that connects North Haven to the Neck) with a map showing where all the marked Manxy burrows are, and just went around checking which ones were still there. I had to be very cautious with where I was walking for that one, as I was just walking over burrows. Luckily I managed to avoid collapsing any – I must be getting better at that, it’s been quite a while since I collapsed one. I hope that I can keep that up, as now the burrows are far more likely to be occupied than they were before. I got some great views of fulmars flying low over my head while doing this, which was amazing to see! I got some great, and some not-so-great photos of them. A personal favourite is a photo very well focused on the fulmar feet…

View to North Haven from my puffin burrows

Choughs!

Sunbathing rabbit – I got at least 4 pictures of different rabbits relaxing amongst the burrows when the puffins weren’t around

This little puffin keeps trying to remove its burrow number… Looks very innocent here though

Fulmar

This… is a photo I took

It’s been an interesting animal week. My personal favourite has been watching the kittiwakes gather mud and weeds for their nests. Some of them seem to try and carry reasonable amounts of stuff, while others just seem to be gathering as much as they can possibly carry. With the puffins, apparently today we had the ‘first fish’, which is confirmation that we now have pufflings on the island!! I did not see the fish, but I imagine more and more puffin will have fish now, which also means we’re probably going to get much busier with monitoring the puffins. We’ll see how that goes – it should be good fun! Before I sign off – a dosa update. We decided to be social and chat, which was lovely, but it did mean that I tried my dosa-attempt before posting this. To be honest, they weren’t too bad! They weren’t RIGHT, that’s for sure, but they weren’t BAD. I wouldn’t say that it was a fail…? It was my first time trying to make dosa, and considering that, and the fact that I was missing quite a few of the ingredients, I’d say it went well.

Kittiwake with a lot of stuff!

Kittiwake with blurry shellducks and a gull in the background

My attempt at a masala dosa (which wordpress is insisting is the most important photo of these three)

Around the island in (less than) 80 days!

This is an idea I had a while ago, and my guess is the time it will take from starting to write this post and actually publishing it will be several days… Basically, I’m going to try and take you on a walk around the whole island (something I still need to try and do in one day). I realise that in my previous posts, I will mention different place names, or mention where I’ve been surveying, though unless you’ve been here and spent a lot of time figuring out what’s where, the place names won’t mean a lot. I’m going to post pictures of noticeable places around the island, and try and give some indication to where they are on a map. There are, of course, far more place names than I’m going to mention here – every field seems to have a different name, and I’m still working them out myself – but I figured I’d cover the places I have mentioned most, or am most likely to mention again.

The places on Skomer I’m most likely to mentioned – I forgot to put Harold Stone on though. Go directly up from North Haven, it’s the last bit of land, and the Welcome Point is between the two.

If I can walk in any direction from the farm (which is where I live at the moment), chances are I’ll probably head out towards Garland Stone, which is the north of the island. On the way out of the farm, I’ll pass ‘The Bench’ (TM), which is a great spot to look out for short eared owls, and to watch the sunset from – especially if you want a good view without going anywhere. We’ve sometimes all been out there in slippers and wrapped in blankets, because we were in a rush to get to the sunset. This section is known as ‘North Valley’, and it’s where most of the short eared owls have been seen so far this season. We can tell one apart from the others as one owl is missing a primary flight feather on its right wing. As you walk along the path, you’ll cross over North Stream and then you’ll soon come across two researchers paths, one shortly after the other. As the name suggests, these paths are not to be used by the general public as they generally get much closer to gull colonies or equivalent for other birds so you wouldn’t want too many people using these as then it would massively disturb the birds. The path on the left leads up to North Pond and the researchers hide. In a different direction, there is a public hide that can be used as well. This hide is right on the edge on the pond, and can be used for various studies and surveys. The path off to the right leads down to Green Pond (which doesn’t have a hide), and there are several studies that are conducted along this path, including bird ringing. I believe that special trips do take visitors down this path, but once again you don’t want the route to get too busy. Last time I went down, there was a gull guarding the entrance as if it was waiting for me to give the password! Both of these paths have researchers boards, so you might find the elusive Skomer vole under one of these.

Green Pond

A lesser black back gull waiting for the password so I can go down to Green Pond

Another sunset from the bench

North Pond

A short eared owl

What it says on the sign!

Sunset from ‘the bench’

Before you get to Garland Stone, you can go off on another path to the left known as the ‘History Trail’. I have gone along this a few times, but it comes out after the Garland Stone, so I don’t go along it as much. From the cliff you can look over to the stone and all the seabirds flying about – often fulmar, various Auks and gulls and the occasional gannet. One of the reasons why I like this spot so much is because I have seen common dolphins once, and harbour porpoises multiple times from there. I keep meaning to do a SeaWatch, but I haven’t got around to it yet. When we were doing the puffin counts back in March, this is where my section started, so I got to know the walk very well. For those of you who have seen it on youtube, our first ‘Huffin’ Puffin Yoga’ with Pryderi the Puffin was filmed here – Catrin did the yoga, Ceris filmed, which left me… as the puffin. I hav to say, a big beak really gets in the way when you’re doing yoga! The next place of note along this path (not Caution Cliffs – there are several of those) in Bull Hole. The walk from Garland Stone to Bull Hole is all along the coast, so I’m always keeping an eye on the water. Normally it’s just a way to see more Auks, or a fulmar soaring by, but you do get the occasional gannet or porpoise. There are puffin burrows along quite a bit of this section, so depending on the time of day you might see them wandering around. All of this section is pretty good for watching the sun set, as your facing west for most of the way.

Garland Stone

Harbour porpoises

More porpoises!!

Guess what – another porpoise!

Some of the puffins wandering around one morning

Fulmar!

Sunset on the west side of the island

Pryderi the Puffin…

The cliffs at Bull Hole are generally covered with guillemots this time of year, and considering their nesting habits (sheer cliff face) I wasn’t really expecting to see them up close at any point (more on that later). I’ll quite happily sit on a rock looking over Bull Hole for any length of time. There’s definitely a pair of choughs somewhere around, even though we haven’t located a nest site left, and you’ll quite often see a pair of peregrines as well. From this perch, you can also look over a lesser black-back gull colony (without getting too close) and there will generally be several jackdaws strutting through the colony. A little way past Bull Hole (on the way to Pig Stone – the next place on the map) is a stone that I would have marked on if I’d made the map a few days later. This particular stone is home to two pairs of gulls that I have named ‘The Swoopys’. I think I mentioned my gull tasks in my last post – I need to find their nests and count the eggs – though I only have to monitor 25 of these nests. After my reception last time, I made the executive decision NOT to monitor their nest. This was probably a good choice on my part, as I have to follow the path to a different nest that I am monitoring that can be seen from the perch of any of the Swoopys. As soon as they spotted me they were in the air and flying above me ready to swoop if I got too close. I was no where near either of their nests. But they could see me, and that was clearly enough! Pig Stone is just a bit further around, and is a rock that is home to quite a few guillemots. When we did the puffin counts, this rock marked the end of my section.

A perching peregrine

Bull Hole

View from the Swoopys – they can see me coming…

Pig Stone

Guillemots

I do have a favourite pair of gulls that I monitor, and these ones are a bit further around the path, closer to Skomer Head. The reason that this pair is my favourite is because they seem to know the drill. They see me coming, they fly off, I go up to the nest and count the eggs, I leave, they fly back. No one needs to scream at me or attack me – I’ll be gone as quickly as I can be, but it does make life easier when no gull is trying to attack. Skomer Head is the most western point of the island (and another good spot for cetacean spotting). The longer I spend on the island the more I know where I’m likely to see certain birds, and there a few wheatear territories around Skomer Head, and they’re always a nice bird to see. There are also a couple of great black-back gull nests here too, and after speaking to the person who monitored the gulls last year, I’m quite glad that these were deemed to inaccessible for another aspect of the study, as apparently this pair were the only birds the fly into the researcher, rather than just trying intimidation tactics! Depending on how much time you have, you can either head back to the farm, through Abyssinia (known as ‘Gull Alley’ by Catrin) and past North Pond (and the public hide) or you can continue on down past the Amos and on to the Wick. The loop that I’ll often do from the farm is go up to Garland Stone, around to Skomer Head and then back – which when you’re stopping to ID birds or just to sit for a bit can take around 2 hours (it can be done in far less, but why would you do that?). For the sake of ‘going around the island’ here, I’m going to continue on to the Wick. Abyssinia is very nice at the moment, with bluebells on all sides, and it also has many of my gulls – luckily ones that are not prone to attack me on sight. Off the path and into the researchers area you do have another pond, West Pond, but that is drying up quite quickly with the limited rain we’ve been having!

View south from Skomer Head

Another porpoise!

Going for a group wander

Pig Stone as seen from Skomer Head

Although I’ve put it on the map, I haven’t spent a huge amount of time over at the Amos. It’s a site that’s used to monitor a lot of different sea bird species, but so far not ones I’ve been assigned to monitor. With recent changes, that may not be true for much longer, but for now I don’t have much to say about the specific location other than it’s very pretty, and you can see a colony of guillemots from there. Once again, as you walk to the Wick from Skomer Head you go through several wheatear territories, and pass quite close to some of my gulls. Although you might not notice it when walking along the paths, you’re actually just on the other side of the path that leads to Abyssinia – though to be fair, the only reason I know this is because I’ve tried accessing my gull nest sites from either side to see if one way makes them less likely to attack me. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t. Worth a try anyway! You have to cross several streams before you get to the Wick, the final one is just before Wick Ridge, where I have several gull nests! I’m probably mentioning the gulls a lot, but in my defence, that’s what I’ve been monitoring over the last few days (including this morning), so it’s fresh on my mind. For the gulls on Wick Ridge, it does make a difference in ‘likelihood of being attacked’ which side I approach from.

The Amos

Close up of the guillemots by the Amos

I enjoy the walk down to the Wick. At the moment, you have all the different sea birds nesting on the cliffs (including guillemots, razorbills and fulmars) and you can just hear them all calling, hear the sea and see everything flying about. Due to the lack of visitors on the island, bracken is starting to grow up on the paths, particularly those around the Wick as it is a very popular site for visitors. We are doing our best to try and stop the bracken from overgrowing the path, but it’ll be interesting to see the state it’s in when visitors are finally allowed back. Walking down this path you do have puffin burrows, and the star of the show themselves, flying in or off, and wandering around amongst the sea campion. This section walking down to the Wick is also where my BBS section starts (breeding bird survey). Once you get down to the Wick, you can see all the birds on the cliff on the left, some swimming in the sea below, and then are more gentle slope on the right with guillemots and razorbills down on the rocks and then puffin burrows higher up. There’s just so much noise and life all around you – chances are there will also be a few oystercatchers behind you, shrieking because they don’t like how close you’ve got to them.

Another puffin

Guillemots on the cliff

Kittiwakes on the cliff

Puffins at sunset

View of the Wick from my BBS

The Wick at sunset

One place that I can never pass without stopping is the hide at Moorey Meer. You can get here from quite a few spots on the island, though one of the ways is a path inland from the Wick – so in this virtual ‘trip around the island’ I will take a slight detour here. To get to the hide you do also pass the remains of an iron age round house, if I remember correctly. The hide itself is a little way off the path and over looks a pond. In the last few days I have spent quite a bit of time in that hide, and from there I have seen my first dunlin as well as a moorehen chick that has an amazing foot-to-body ratio. There are always gulls around and in the last few weeks there’s normally a pair of shellducks there as well. Out of all the ponds this is probably the one that I’ve spent the most time in, probably in large part because of how close the hide is to the main path. There’s always something interesting that can be seen there as well. Moorey Meer is also home to a wood pigeon that seems to enjoy tap dancing on the roof of the hide in short intervals – it’ll fly off for a moment before landing on the roof again and starting up the routine again… Between the Wick and Moorey Meer you have to cross Wick ridge, which is generally where I start my BBS, as it is the closest the the farm of the three ends (the other end being just past High Cliff, as I cover the south plateau).

View out of the hide

Moorehen and chick

Dunlin!

Shellduck contemplating life…

When I’m doing my BBS, the walk from the Wick to Mew Stone has taken me an hour because of the detour I have to take on one of the researchers paths. If you’re just walking around the island, this section will take you less than 5 minutes! My BBS takes me off to the right and I have to walk carefully over this whole section to avoid stepping on burrows. You do get an amazing view over the Wick, but I have to admit, I am always very relieved to be back on the solid non-burrowed ground at Mew Stone. Since Mew Stone is separated from the main island of Skomer by the sea, there’s no actual way to get onto the stone, but it is a lovely spot to sit. Whilst sitting here, you can look over at the guillemots on Mew Stone. If you’re lucky, there might be a few choughs flying about. Last time I was there, a pair of great black-back gulls spent a lot of time chasing off a pair of ravens that kept getting too close to their nest. On your left, when facing the stone, you can see and hear a pair of wheatear singing and flying about. I think of this as a very peaceful place just because although you’re very close to a lot of other spots on the island, you can’t really see any of them whilst perched there. I know that the spot is marked down as a picnic spot on the map given to visitors, so it’s quite possible that if this was a normal year I wouldn’t be thinking that!

Mew Stone

Pair of choughs wandering around

To get to High Cliff from Mew Stone, you have to walk through a field with an unhappy lesser black-back gull colony on your left (like most gulls, they don’t like you walking by too close), and then you go down a very steep path to get to the cliff itself. There are always fulmar flying about whilst you’re sitting here, and a wren is normally sining loudly and flying along the researchers path below you. There are also all the three Auk species you get here flitting about. They’re always swimming about in rafts at the base of the cliff, but if you’re there in the evening there will be loads of puffins going in and out of burrows around you. The guillemots have a rock at the base of the cliff that they seem to use to dive off from and bask in the sun as they’re coming back in. A few times, there has been a peregrine flying around the area. This is normally the spot where my BBS goes crazy. For most of my section, it’s very easy to keep up with the birds I’m seeing. There are quite a few around, but it’s when I get to High Cliff that all the Corvids seem to go mad. The jackdaws especially seem to be everywhere! If the bird is flying around, we need to make a note on the map what direction they’re going in, so this section of my map is always a crazy zig zag of arrows going in every direction.

Guillemots coming out of the water

High cliff in the evening

More guillemots at High Cliff

From High Cliff, I normally head back to the farm via Moorey Meer, but sometimes I’ll continue on to North Haven. To get to North Haven you also go past some rocks known as Captain Kites – and this is where Catrin, Ceris and I left the prize for the Easter egg hunt we made for the wardens. I say we – Catrin brought the Easter bunnies, Ceris came up with the riddles, I just helped make the cardboard eggs (decorating them with the colourful, patterned paper used to cover ‘who gives a crap’ toilet rolls) and wrote out a couple of the clues on the cardboard eggs. From Captain Kites, you can also look down to South Haven, where there will often be a few seals swimming around as well as the occasional gannet, but now it makes me think of the Easter egg hunt. From here, if you head a bit further along the path you can either walk up to Harold Stone (directly in front of you), go left to the farm or go right to head down to either the wardens house or to the welcome point. If you go down to the welcome point you’ll come across nearly 90 steps heading down to the sea. At the moment, the steps are the best place to see guillemots and razorbills up close! Some of the birds have eggs at the moment, and the guillemots have these lovely speckled blue eggs. All around you here you also have puffin burrows. Shortly after I arrived at Skomer, we were at the top of the steps one afternoon when all the puffins decided to fly in, and it was amazing just to hear all of them flying about.

View to North Haven from the Welcome Point

View over South and North Haven from Captain Kites

Easter egg hunt!!

Razorbill

What’s going on over there?

Guillemot with egg

Down at North Haven, as well as this being where the wardens live there’s also quite a bit of work that can be done. It’s generally where we’ll do our bird log in the evenings, to record what sections of the island have been visited, and numbers of any birds seen along the way. Across a saddle you have the Neck. The saddle is known as the Isthmus – and I have been on this section when doing puffin ring re-sightings and Manxy ring re-sightings (now that’s a fun task!!), but I haven’t been all the way over to the Neck yet. I’ve seen loads of photos from around the Neck when going through seal photos from last year and trying to match them to individuals in the catalogue – as much as I do enjoy looking at pictures of seals, playing ‘seal snap’ did get a bit tedious after a while. I think I got 9 or 10 matches in the end, though sometimes you were having to go through about 800 pages of catalogue before finding a match. North Haven is also where I’ve started making a map to record puffin occupancy. Later today I’ll probably be sorting out any posts that can’t be read through the telescope for various reasons. North Haven has wonderful views over the sea and is surrounded by so many different sea birds, so it must be an amazing place to be living! The downside, is that to leave North Haven and go anywhere else on the island you have to go up a rather steep hill. Despite not having such a variety of seabirds, I’m quite happy being at the farm, simply because it means I don’t have to do that hill quite so much!

Ring re-sightings

View back over to North Haven from my puffin burrows

Me out doing ring re-sightings

When I’ve gone on Manxy walks in the evening, I’ve normally done the section of path between the farm and North Haven. When you’ve got up the hill from North Haven, you can either go straight on to get to the farm, or take a slightly longer, but more scenic route via Harold Stone (both paths have loads of Manxies at night, so either works). There are quite a lot of oystercatchers on this section, and we think that there might be a short eared owl nest somewhere about with the number of times we’ve seen one flying around and chasing off any other raptor that gets too close. To get back to the farm, we have to go through a field called Shearing Haze. We’ve seen quite a few curlew this year (they seem to be enjoying the lack of visitors), and there’s often at least one pair along this stretch. As you near the farm, there are a couple of big rocks up on your left. One of these has a plinth of sorts on the top. This one is Trig Point and is the highest point of the island. The plinth is something to do with Ordinance Surveys, but you can often see a bird perched on the top overlooking the island. Trig Point is a great spot to watch sunsets from, as you can see the sea in pretty much all directions, but you can see the ponds and other sections of the island while watching the sun go down. Basically anywhere on the west and north west of the island is a good spot for sunsets over the sea, but Trig Point is a great way to watch the sun go down and see the whole island at the same time!

Trig Point

Sunset from Trig Point

The farm

Walking between North Haven and the Farm

Manxy on the wall

I think that now we’re back at the farm, that is more or less around the entirety of the island! Most of the places that I’ve mentioned are places that (in a normal year) are accessible to any visitor on the island. I know that I’ve mentioned a few of the researchers paths, but to be honest (with the exception of researchers paths to hides and ponds) I tend to stick to the main paths anyway, unless I’m specifically doing another task, like the BBS surveys or looking for gull nests. I don’t think I’ve mentioned bluebells at all in this post – that’s not because they’re gone! The island is basically turning blue. It would be far quicker to list the places where there aren’t bluebells. There aren’t too many on the south plateau, there aren’t really any in the farm itself, or most of the way to North Haven – but other than that (and right on the cliffs), there are bluebells more or less everywhere else, which is absolutely amazing. There’s so much to see here that I’m so glad I made the effort to get here early – no matter how stressful it was to get here before lockdown! I’ll try and get another post up soon – I just need to have another idea for something…

I didn’t think there were enough razorbill pictures, so here are a few more!

Bluebells

Swallows have now taken up residence around the farm – they like our washing line!

The best named rabbit on the island – Arthur Martin

We’re going on a gull hunt! (And we’re only slightly scared)

So the longer I’m here the more we’re moving towards bird surveys and doing less maintenance tasks. There’s still the odd bit of painting and varnishing to be done (like my ‘NO LANDING’ signs that make me feel like Bilbo Baggins), but we’re spending more and more time outside. Normally, the survey tasks would be divided between loads more people – there are normally groups of researchers out here, up to 6 weekly volunteers and another long-term volunteer, but right now with just 5 of us we’re having to be selective with what we do and don’t do. Without visitors that would normally be taking up a large part of the day, we do have more time to do the surveys, but it’s not an ideal situation! Still, we manage, and we’re enjoying ourselves, even if we’re often shattered by the end of the day. Some of the tasks we’ve divided up between the five of us, for example the breeding bird surveys. We need to do at least 3 of these, and we all completed our second BBS in the last week. For these, we go out around 7am and each have a section or two of the island to go around and make a note of everything. If the birds appear in the same general area at least twice, we will put that area down as their territory on one big map. I have the southern plateau, and I now love walking around that area – I feel a bit like a conductor: enter wren… NOW, and in come the wheatears!! It’s really nice knowing what birds I’m likely to see where, and I can stop and listen out for them if I can’t see them initially.

Wheatear pair I always see by Mew Stone

A male wheatear

A wood pigeon that must have decided to tap dance while I was in the hide, judging by the noise it was making…

Jackdaw!

Another task that we divide up is the puffin ring re-sightings. This is done mainly so we can get some idea of adult survival. On different evenings (ideally at least 3 times a week), one of us will head down to North Haven with a telescope and make our way slowly across the Neck and try and spot as many puffins with colour rings as possible. This does seem to lead to muttering names and curses at any puffin that you can see HAS rings, but either another puffin is in the way, the puffin is sitting down, it flies off, or basically any reason why you are not able to see the colour rings on the puffins. I’ve only done it once so far, and I spotted 15 with rings that I could read (and another 4 puffins that were causing issues…), so I’m quite pleased with that! Whilst down there, I would move very slowly to try not to disturb the puffins, but it was amazing to be there, just me, completely surrounded by puffins! I’m really looking forwards to doing it again. I took so many photos – I was only there an hour and a half, but when I uploaded my photos back at the farm I believe I had 138 new photos. Ooops… Later in the season, as a group we’ll be spending more time to do puffin occupancy studies, so watching the burrows to see if adults are coming and going with food, but we haven’t had the ‘first fish’ yet so there can’t be any pufflings on the island.

My view while looking for ringed puffins

So many puffins!!

This puffin reluctantly showed my its rings eventually

This puffin sat on its rings… Thanks puffin!

My favourite puffin! Its rings are clear, and it stayed in place long enough for me to get several clear photos

One of my tasks for the breeding season is to do great black-back gull productivity studies. To do this, I need to monitor 25 nests at random, and count the eggs, and see how many of them hatch and the later fledge. It’s still too early in the season to see chicks, so my task over the last few days has been to find the nests. There is a convenient map and GPS that can help me find last years nests, most of which are still being used, and I have found a few new nests on my own. Most of my new nests have been found by looking where I often see gulls sitting. Another key indication that there might be a nest is the gulls will be circling and screaming. The seem to like nesting on top of rocky outcrops, so unfortunately, in order to see the nest I need to be pretty close, and to see INTO the nest, I need to be even closer. I appear to be trying to make an enemy of every gull on the island (as I’ve had to go through some lesser black-back gull colonies to get to the great black-back nests), which wasn’t what I set out to do when I came here, but hopefully they don’t have great memories!! I have found 34 nests so far, and only 2 pairs have tried to attack me so I’m counting that as a win! Unfortunately, I will have to go back to those areas as their actions kind of gave away the fact that there must be nests there. On my map, those two areas are down as ‘Swoopy’ and ‘Swoopy’s Friends’, so I’ll probably have to change that before there’s an official map of this years nest sites. My main take away is that I’m really glad I’m not trying to find tern nests…

The edited photo I sent my family and some friends after the watching gulls chased me off.

Quite a few of the nests I’ve found do already have eggs in their nests, which was cool to see (even if it meant the gulls were likely to be more aggressive there). From looking things up, it seems like great black-backs have 2-3 eggs, but weirdly in all the nests I’ve seen not a single nest had 2 eggs. They either had 1 or 3. They do take a break between each egg they lay, but it’s still odd that none of them have just 2 eggs at the moment. Their eggs are really nice (to look at – I’ve not taken or eaten any), and are all speckled. I still have a few of the nests from last year to find, and the nests by the Swoops, so that’ll probably be done in the nest few days. Once it gets a bit later in the season, I’ll have to select 25 of the nests and then go around all the selected nests every few days to do the productivity studies. There’s probably a bit more to it than just counting eggs and chicks, but I do need to find out a bit more about the studies.

Gull eggs!!

A nest and a view

Lurking gulls…

Keeping guard!

A short update on (mostly) non-bird related happenings – It’s definitely a nice time of year to be wandering around the island with all the spring flowers coming through, and new bird species arriving. The swallows are coming back, in greater numbers each day, and we ever have a couple lingering around the farm (making a mess of my nice, clean compost loos, but what can I do). I believe that we should be getting more and more warblers, but I hope they come in slowly if only because I’m still struggling with their identification… I’m getting much better at a lot of the other ‘small brown birds’, but these ones are fast and seem to like hiding. I know that I’ve heard sedge warblers, for example, but I’ve not seen them! I only know that the whitethroats are around because one ever so helpfully landed on my kitchen windowsill as if to confirm that they DO exist, but I’ve seen no trace of them since! The flowers are much more obliging (obviously). There’s loads of white sea campion (and the occasional red sea campion) around the coast, and then you have bluebells popping up everywhere! Whole sections of the island are just going blue, which is lovely to see. The bracken is starting to come up as well, so the landscape is no longer looking quite so brown and dried out. The lack of visitors is meaning that the bracken is trying to come up all over the path, especially around the Wick and High Cliff (both areas with lots of puffins and very popular with visitors) – there’s only so much trampling 5 people can do!

Sea campion by Mew Stone…

…and up close!

The island is going blueee (and Skokholm in the background)

Bluebells up-close in North Haven

As a marine biologist, I have enjoyed the opportunity to go down and look at some of the rocky shore organisms we have around – and turns out I’ve done projects on a lot of them! I still am yet to see any crabs, which I’m hoping to change soon. I did my MSc thesis on decapod crustaceans (mainly crabs), so it would be nice to see those again! We had a slight boat issue when we were getting our last food order (all sorted now), which gave me time to sit and look at barnacles. As boring as that might sound to many people, last year my MSc class all went on a week long field trip where the work was primarily focused on barnacles, so I was very happy to have an opportunity to see what species we have here – Chthamalus montagui (the favourite barnacle – kite bois, as we took to calling them) at the high shore, and down quite a way before Semibalanus balanoides takes over from the mid-shore. As well as the barnacles, there were also dog whelks and limpets (Nucella lapillus and Patella vulgata for anyone that’s interested, and for me to confirm to myself that I still remember these things).

Chthamalus montagui (kite bois)

Semibalanus balanoides

To re-gain peoples interest before I finish this off, we did also have a very curious (and very pretty) grey seal watching us curiously as we carried our food up the many steps. Another, more cautious, seal stayed a bit further away to keep an eye on us, but this one was almost completely unafraid of us.

I couldn’t mention such a beautiful seal without posting a picture of it!