Fieldwork Season Begins!
The sun has finally started to shine this week which has meant a start to all our fieldwork.
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.
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 come.
Thank you so much to the Thousand Island & Falcon Boats staff for getting us out and safely back from Grassholm and to Will & Hal at Richardson Media for undertaking the drone flights.
Back on Ramsey the catwalk in the harbour was wearing away after 23 years of service so whilst we were undertaking fieldwork Derek & Tom managed to replace it on the 19th. We are very pleased to have a new one so thank you very much to Derek & Tom for all you hard work ordering and installing it.
Weekly Wildlife Round Up
We had another check of our Manx Shearwater productivity plots last week and to our surprise found a ringed shearwater in a nest box that was originally ringed here as a fledgling in September 2019. So after 5 years it is now returned to Ramsey as an adult prospecting with a potential partner. We are hoping they will take up residence in one of the artificial nest boxes and breed.
Our Chough have also been busy this week with 5 pairs now incubating. Their partners are now busily flying back and forth feeding them on the nest. So Chough fledglings are certainly on their way!
Our Farmhouse Blackbirds fledged their young on the 17th and the fledglings were hopping around the bramble bushes in the valley.
The Crow pairs have also been busy nesting building on some of the stone walls.
In terms of other sightings we have had plenty of migrants passing through with large numbers of Blackcap, Goldcrest, Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff being seen across the island over the past week.
Sandwich Tern were spotted in the Sound on the 14th and our first Yellow Wagtails for the season were recorded today.
Other sightings have included Grey Heron, Whimbrel, Curlew, Turnstone, large flocks of 50+ Goldfinches and a Short Eared Owl.
We also had 15 Red Kites over the Island on the 21st.
Wild flowers are starting to pop up now with Lesser Celandines, Ground Ivy, Dog Violet and Heath Milkwort.
Until next week.
Alys Perry
Assistant Warden
Comments
Post a Comment