RSPB Ramsey & Grassholm Islands Blog

 There has been plenty of sunshine this week which has been welcomed by all and meant the island can dry out a little after all the heavy rain in March.  Views of the East Coast in the glorious sunshine on the 28th © Alys Perry. Griff the island sheepdog cooling off in a trough after a morning walk in the sunshine © Alys Perry. In between welcoming more visitors to the island we received and sorted a delivery of new gates and gates posts which will be put in later in the season. We finished cleaning the volunteer accommodation so it is now ready for our first volunteers to arrive this weekend. We monitored more chough nest sites and checked our Manx Shearwater study plots too. In addition, we  held our first in-person team meeting of the season which was great and meant that Greg could get out to Ramsey for the first time this year.  We also welcomed Duran to the island who will be conducting invertebrate surveys for us in collaboration with previous research work co...

 The sun has finally started to shine this week which has meant a start to all our fieldwork.  A beautiful sunrise shot over Treginnis taken on the 12th © Chris Jones. We conducted our first breeding bird surveys of the year this week, welcomed more visitors to the island and did our first surveillance trip of Grassholm Island. Gower Ranger leaving with some happy visitors on the 17th © Alys Perry. The weather was absolutely perfect for the first trip of the season out to Grassholm. Greg & Nia managed to land successfully on the island which meant they were able to check on the colony from the land and change the SD cards and batteries in the camera traps. Whilst Nia & Greg were on the island Myself and Will stayed on the boat and did some monitoring of the colony by drone.  The colony is looking healthy with no signs of HPAI. The gannets are busy making their nests with a few already incubating eggs. Hopefully this is a sign of a successful breeding season to com...

Storm Kathleen was certainly impressive on the weekend. It was the roughest that Nia and I have seen it in the harbour, with 6m of swell rolling in and hitting the back of the harbour. Definitely not suitable for any boats but impressive to see none the less. The harbour during storm Kathleen on the 6th © Alys Perry. The harbour during storm Kathleen on the 6th © Alys Perry. Despite Kathleen the harbour and all the buildings remained intact. As we had another week of no boats we carried on with whatever indoor jobs we could. Chris spent his time fixing and mending some of the gates around the farm buildings as well as building new raised beds in the newly rabbit fenced vegetable patch. Nia and I carried on cleaning and re organising the workshop, finishing various admin jobs, cleaning and painting the bungalow and ordering more nice stock for the island shop. Sylvie and Kelpie enjoying some much needed grain after the storm © Alys Perry. The chickens didn't mind the storm and have ...

It’s been another week of turbulent weather and it looks like we are in for more this weekend with 40knts of wind and 5.8m swells forecast to come in from the South, safe to say it is time to batten down the hatches! Chris managed to get this incredible photo of a rainbow over the Ramsey farmhouse in between rain showers on the 27th. It's not often you get views like this on Ramsey!  © Chris Jones. We did manage to get our first visitor boat of the season on the 1 st.  It was great to welcome visitors back to the Island for another season and good for me & Nia to get back into the swing of the welcome talks and managing boats. Sadly we aren't due another boat for a while but thank you to Thousand Islands for making the first land of the season a success.  The Gower Ranger leaving with visitors on the 1st © Alys Perry. The past week has been taken up by clearing and tidying the workshop, surveying one of the rare water plants on the island (the Three-lobed Water Cr...