seabirds

Island Life – Part 2 – Birds & Mammals

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

I thought it would only take me a day or two to write part 2 of this, but with 2 heatwaves this month, my productivity (always dubious at the best of times) has plummeted. But here at last are some of the gorgeous birds and mammals we saw on the Isles of Scilly in June.

I took a couple of bird-watching boat trips; one with my long-suffering family and one alone when they’d had enough of me. The Scillies are a fantastic place to spot seabirds; it made me wish I was better at identifying them. So please feel free to correct me if I’ve got any of these wrong. As so often is the case, I didn’t really have the right camera lens with me and that combined with rocking boats and user error, means none of these are exactly amazing photos, but hopefully they’re recognisable at least.

First up, what I am assuming to be a Black-headed Gull, due to its black head! I realise though there are other species that would fit this somewhat basic description, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

The next one I am at least confident is an Oystercatcher, although it does to my eye look quite like the penguin from Wallace & Gromit with a red beak stuff on it! Again a shockingly bad photo and I can’t even blame a rocking boat for this one as I think I took it from land.

 

We saw a few Shags, often standing looking quite aloof with a crowd of other birds nearby. Seen alone they are quite gawky looking birds and I always think there’s something a bit archaic about them.

One of the few seabirds I can readily recognise is the Gannet. It’s distinctive enough that it’s pretty much unmistakeable.  This one floated serenely by the boat, looking as if it had recently had a right good feed.

There were of course lots of large gulls present everywhere. We passed a fisherman, hauling in lobster pots at one point and the sky around his boat was just full of an assortment of gulls. Some have black backs (Black-backed gulls?), some have grey backs – to my disappointment there doesn’t seem to be one called a Grey-backed Gull, so I’m guessing these are Herring Gulls?

All the seabirds above are beautiful, but I can’t help having a soft spot for the Auk family. Apparently there are 5 species seen regularly in the UK and we were lucky enough to see 3 of these. The most plentiful that week were the Guillemots – sleek black/dark brown and white birds, gathering in groups on the rocks and in the water.

Then there were the Razorbills; I never saw these on the rocks, only in the water and often swimming with the Guillemots too. Razorbills are named for their famously sharp-edged beaks, ideal for grabbing fish.

But of course top of the wish list was to see Puffins and thankfully we did. The Skipper wouldn’t take the boat too close to the cliffs where the puffins were nesting as we didn’t want to disturb them, but we were close enough to see several outside their burrows.

Then there were the ones we saw on the water. It’s no surprise that they are everyone’s favourite seabird; what’s not to love about those cheeky little faces.

So on to the mammals. I did see a split-second glimpse of a dolphin from the Scillonian on the way back to the mainland, but that was it as far as cetaceans went. Grey seals were much more obliging. Again our skipper managed to get close enough for us to see some hauled up on the rocks, but not too close to frighten them.

At first we thought it was just adults, but in the second photo from a slightly different angle, you can see a seal pup at the back of the group. I was so thrilled; I’ve seen seals many times (even sieved seal poop for a living for a while – that’s a whole other story), but never seen a young one like this!

But the mammalian star of the show for me had to be a surprise we found on Tresco. I say surprise, but obviously the locals knew they were there as they’d been deliberately introduced. Red Squirrels! We saw a sign saying there were red squirrels as soon as we entered Tresco gardens, but I thought we’d be lucky just to get a glimpse. But then we turned around and there was a beautiful squirrel sitting right there, enjoying some nuts. I was fumbling with my camera , sure it would disappear, but no it was clearly unfazed by our presence and carried on snacking. The best views I’ve ever had of a red squirrel.

We saw several more as we enjoyed the gardens, although none as close as that first one. It must be an ideal habitat for them and they seemed to be doing really well.

So that’s my round-up of the wildlife we saw on the Isles of Scilly. It really is a fantastic place to visit, although I’m tempted to say “no it’s dreadful” to stop loads of people going and spoiling it! The isolation, the warm climate (warmer than most of the UK at least) and beautiful scenery make the islands the best wildlife destination I’ve been to in Britain and I can’t wait to go back.

Autumnwatch – Malvern Style

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

I’ve not managed to blog much this month, but it’s not been due to any lack of activity in the garden. We’ve both been suffering from a stinker of a cold and our wildlife watching has been largely confined to the views from the sofa. Fortunately the TV offerings have made up for the lack of outdoor activity. Blue Planet II returned this weekend and “blue” us away (sorry couldn’t resist the pun!).  David Attenborough was a huge influence on me as a child and probably one of the reasons I originally became a biologist – and he’s still got it. Inspirational as ever – false killer whales befriending dolphins, fish that leapt into the air to hunt seabirds and ones that used tools to open clams. All absolutely incredible.

Not only Blue Planet, but we had Autumn Watch last week too. Not quite the same wow factor, but great stuff all the same. The beauty of Autumn (and Spring) Watch is that it is British wildlife, so we’ve either seen the animals featured or can at least hope to see them one day. They often have projects or surveys that the public can contribute to and last week’s series was no exception. They launched a project called Seabird Watch which aims to get the public to analyse thousands of images of seabird colonies. So I’ve been having a go; it’s not as easy as it first seems, but it is very addictive! Here’s one of my efforts – lots of kittiwakes and guillemots.

If anyone wants to have a go there are still thousands of images to analyse – go to

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/penguintom79/seabirdwatch

Autumnwatch of course featured all sorts of mammals and birds and all manner of fancy equipment for recording them. We don’t exactly have the same budget as the BBC, but I did go wild this week and bought a new gadget – this mini camera. It’s not much bigger than a 2 pence piece!

It’s so small we can fix it to twigs in the apple tree like this:

Of course like all new gadgets it’s taking a bit of getting used to. First few attempts turned out to be upside down. Second set were the right way up, but not exactly pointing in the right direction. I did get these starlings; although they’re not really taking centre stage they do at least demonstrate that it works and has the potential to get some decent footage.

I have now managed to fix the date, so it doesn’t look like we’re in a time warp from 2 years ago, but I still need to work out the night vision and motion detection bit. It’s made a bit difficult by the badly translated instructions, but hopefully I’ll get there in the end. In the meantime here’s some nice footage using the good old trail camera – not quite the majestic owls from Autumnwatch, but a cute blue tit having a bath instead.

Again we may not get the badgers and foxes of Autumnwatch, but we do have hedgehogs! I recently built another hedgehog feeding station (the last one having gone for a burton when a magpie knocked the trail camera over onto it and smashed it!) Fortunately the hedgehogs seem quite happy with mark II and this fairly large one has been a regular visitor.

I was surprised though to see this much smaller one here for the first time. Hedgehogs need to be at least 450g by now to have enough fat reserves to make it through the winter. So if I can find this one again I will try and weigh him to check that he’ll be OK.

The garden is definitely feeling very autumnal now and we even had our first frost yesterday morning with a chilly 0.1C overnight. The leaves have nearly all gone from the apple tree and my beloved moths are now few and far between. Marking the season though it is Halloween tonight and our allotment produced 3 whopping great pumpkins – the biggest of which here is seen with wine bottle and lemon for scale rather than some weird recipe I’m concocting.

Last year I carved the pumpkin into a bird feeder, but this one was a bit big to hang  up, so it’s just a regular scary pumpkin face. There’s something very satisfying about having grown our own pumpkins.

Finally from Halloween to Bonfire Night and a plea for everyone to look out for hedgehogs (and other small mammals and amphibians). If you’re going to have a bonfire – ideally build it on the day it’s going to be lit. If that’s not possible, then please check it thoroughly before lighting – lift up the base and look and listen for signs of hedgehogs. And please just light it from one side to give any hoggies in there a chance to escape from the other side.