Today is the first day so far that I have done any visitor work. We had no visitors in the morning as the sea was really choppy, but we had one boatload in the afternoon. I was on tickets, which is just selling tickets and letting in the National Trust members who get in for free! afterwards I just wandered around a little and spoke to some people. Some stupid person decided to poke an Eider duck (which is quite easy as they nest directly next to the path), which disturbed her a lot as you can imagine, so she got off of her nest, leaving her eggs in the cold and vulnerable to predators! I was able to rescue them though by covering them up with vegetation, asking visitors to move away and backing off myself to allow her to hop back on the nest, which she did do eventually! :)

Did chores in the morning (as I will be doing every morning unless I've got the day off). We were then told about the bird monitoring work that we will be beginning soon and we were each allocated an area where we can each monitor the different birds species. We each monitor the birds in our own sections at regular intervals to count eggs and look for chicks. We use coloured stones to mark the location of the nests that we are monitoring so that we don't loose any of them! Therefore, me and Graeme spent some of the afternoon painting large stones to use as markers for the Eider duck and Arctic Tern nests. We will be using bamboo canes as well as the stones to mark the ones that are further from the path (mostly my Eiders!).

We will each be monitoring:

• 50 Eider duck nests
• 50 Arctic Tern nests
• 50 Shag nests
• 50 Kittiwake nests
• 10 Razorbill nests

We will all do the Puffins together, and Steely and Jason are going to do the Guillemots. We split the Oystercatchers, Ringed Plovers, Pied Wagtails and Rock Pipits nests between us, as there aren't very many of them. We also have the option to monitor the Black-Headed Gull nests as well!! So lots of work will be coming up soon! As the Shags, Kittiwakes and Razorbills nest on the cliffs, we obviously cannot mark them with stones or canes, as we can't get to them without climbing down the cliff, so we will just be taking photos of their locations instead (which I put on here for all to see).

As I mentioned yesterday, I was the first to use the shower here, which seemed good to me! So we got the fire going and waited a while for it to heat the water. Unfortunately, we may have left the fire on for too long, as I was 'treated' to a very very hot shower!! But at least I had the chance to get clean :) will be brilliant when they get the pump in the basement so that it all works properly and we can have regular showers here! Really nice sunny day today but couldn't get any photos since I still have no batteries in my camera! Hopefully I will soon though, as we should be going back to the mainland sometime this week! Not much else to report and this has become a very long post now, so I'll leave it there for the day :) x