Week 2 began with the arrival of some familiar faces as more of our fantastic volunteers gave up their time and skills to help out with our long list of jobs. First to arrive was MWT Marine Officer, Lara Howe, along with boxes and boxes of decoy Puffins and speakers to put along the coastline. This project has been ongoing for 6 years at three sites along the East & West Coast. Puffins are one of a number of seabirds that were killed off by the accidentally introduced long tail population, but despite eradication of longtails they have not yet returned as they are incredibly site faithful. They breed in colonies and are proving very difficult to encourage back. Despite this, birds are spotted around the Calf from May-July and it is hoped that the Puffin calls and decoys will encourage more birds to come ashore.

Later in the week we were joined by Paul Corrin and Mike Prior who came fully equipped with essential tools to build a brand new bird hide by the Millpond. We started with breeze blocks and concrete to make a level surface for the hide.

Cuckoos are only seen on the Calf once or twice in a year but this one happily sat on a fencepost overlooking our work before flying into Rob’s mist nest. We were very lucky to be able to see it so close up!

After several stories about past wardens getting stuck and Dan’s famous ditch, we were wondering which parts of the Island would shortly become our legacy of destruction. Thankfully Juan was a pro, and despite his occasional disturbing comment about keeping our arms in when the vehicle rolls, we picked it up fairly quickly with no accidents as of yet!

An interesting example of this is the courtship display of a meadow pipit, called parachuting. The males fly up to 4 meters into the air and only occasionally flutter their wings on descent so it appears to glide back down to the ground using its wings like a parachute to impress females. We will complete one each month until July hopefully tracking progress on the pairs we spotted this week. 

Unfortunately this year’s Great Black-backed Gull nest count followed in the same vein as previous years, diminishing from 70 in its prime to only 10 this year. This is reflective of their general UK population numbers diminishing since the 1980s, putting them in the Birds of Conservation Concern (BoCC4) amber conservation list. To keep up the theme of bitter ends the weather turned in the afternoon and the poor wardens and volunteers were driven into rather large hailstones for the duration of the journey back at a painful 20 knots, which helped curb my jealousy somewhat.

The sea was flat calm and beautiful, and before we left I ventured down to Gibdale for a picnic with Christa just as a Bottlenose Dolphin swam through breaching a couple of times so I could capture a photo. The journey back to the mainland also gave us a great opportunity to see the sugarloaf with its Guillemot and Kittiwake colonies back in full force.

As Rob reached out to grab the eider, it projectile pooed over the eggs and all over poor Rob’s legs and feet.  Not a great start, but bird poo is a standard part of any good bird ringer’s uniform. The rest of the mission was a success with 4 ringed adult Shags and 2 nests with young chicks not yet big enough to be ringed as they were only a week old. In total they found 18 active nests with eggs, so there should be many more adventures to check on their progress in the near future! Watch this space…