Sarah at the Farnes: June 2010

Tuesday 22 June 2010

The News in Brief

I realised a couple of days ago that I haven't written a blog entry for quite a while now. Not too sure how long its been, as time moves really strangely here and I'm never quite sure what day it is or what the date is, but I know its been a while. Therefore, I have decided to list some of the more recent happenings of the Farne Islands. So here is the News in Brief... (in no particular order).

Nest Counts
We finished the nest count on Inner Farne a short time ago. It took us much longer than it has in previous years as we started much later and were kind of slow whilst doing it, and so we couldn't get it all done in one day. The weather then prevented us from finishing it for quite while, but eventually we managed to do it! So we have now counted all of the nests of all of the ground-nesting birds on the island. Not sure of the results yet though.

Cliff Counts
Cliff counts have also taken a very long time. But this is really because our boat engine was broken for a long time so we couldn't go out and count the cliff nesting birds. When the engine was fixed, bad weather struck, so again we couldn't do them. But more recently the weathers been ok! Therefore, we now only have one more cliff count to do, which will take place tommorow morning if the weather remains good!

'Jumpers'
The only problem with doing cliff counts so late in the year (about 2 weeks later than we should have done them) is that many of the Guillemot chicks are no longer there. When the chicks are old enough the parents fly to the sea, leaving their chick on top of the cliff on its own. They then stay in the water below the cliff and call to the chick until it jumps off! Most of the time they hit the water, but the occasional one hits a ledge of rock and has to jump from ledge to ledge (it's pretty funny!). This means that many of the Guillemots we should be counting are now out of sea with their chicks, and more are leaving every day! Which may mean that out Guillemot population will appear to be down this year, although it won't really be.

Chicks
Almost all of the species on the island now have chicks. Shags have been on chicks for a long time now, as have Kittiwakes and Black-Headed Gulls. Most of the Sandwich Terns have chicks, as do the Arctic Terns. There are more and more Eider ducks leaving with their chicks every day now, so there are very few left on their nests. Common Terns are also on chicks, but as far as I know Fulmars are still on eggs.

Chapel Chick
Speaking of chicks, there are some that have very odd habits. There is one Arctic Tern chick that has made the Chapel its home. During the day and for most of the evening it stays in the Chapel and hides under the pews to avoid being trampled by the visitors. In the mornings and during quiet periods the adults fly into the chapel with Sandeels to feed to it! It's pretty cool, but it does mean that the Chapel floor is covered in quite a lot of poop, and we've had to put up signs to warn visitors of its presence!

Chick protection and Veg. clearance
Many of the Arctic Tern chicks are now getting to the stage where they're big enough to run around, which they do frequently. They like to hide in the vegetation when their parents are away, but as soon as they hear the adult calling, they run onto bare ground so that their parents can see them. Unfortunately, this has resulted in many chicks running onto the path, which obviously causes trampling issues. To prevent this from happening, we have spent many morning ripping up the vegetation 1.5 feet either side of the paths in the areas where Terns are nesting, so that the chicks will move further back into the remaining vegetation and stop going onto the path. In addition to this, we have made several 'chick protection boards' from old wood to fence them in a bit, to draw peoples attention to the fact that they're there, and to make sure that they don't get accidentally trodden on. It's working so far!

Bird Ringing
Done lots of ringing recently as the ringer that comes out here said that if I'm good enough and do lots of ringing with him, he'll give me a 'Restricted C Permit' which means I'll be able to ring certain species of birds when he's not there, which is a really awesome thing to have here! We were ringing Arctic Tern adults and chicks and Sandwich Tern chicks, but I also got to ring a Puffin which was awesome!

Birds in Buildings
We've had a lot of birds coming into the buildings recently! A Shag was found hanging around in the Gents toilets, a Puffin was in the Ladies toilets, we had 3 Puffins and a Pigeon in the cellar, and 2 juvenile Pied Wagtails in the Information Centre! We managed to remove them all safely though! :)

Stormy Days
Had a few very windy days recently. And by windy I mean 25mph winds! Which caused some very rough seas, the worst being 11.5ft swell! The windyness was both good and bad. It meant we could have some late mornings, which is always appreciated, and it meant that the birds weren't disturbed by visitors. However, it did mean that many of the Arctic Tern chicks died, as the parents were unable to feed, and it's the cause for all of the birds in buildings. In addition to this, many Kittiwake nests got washed away (including the young chicks in them), and we had several other birds that got very wet and unable to fly, which we had to rescue and put in a box in front of the fire to dry out. All of which were successful, which is good. The rough seas and strong winds also prevented me from getting out to see Chris, which sucked a lot as I'm not sure when I'll get to see him now. I'm seeing my dad in early July, and I'm now just hoping the same thing won't happen then!

The Tides of Spring
The storm wasn't really helped by the spring tides that we've had recently. Spring tides are when the difference between high tide and low tide is very large. So we've had very high high tides and very low low tides. (The opposite of this is neep tides, where there is very little difference between high and low tides.) The other issue with spring tides is that the very high tides have washed away several Arctic Tern nests and several Ringed Plover nests that were on the beach.

Media Coverage
Lots of TV programmes have been filiming here recently. We had Escape to the Country and Animal 24/7 filming on Brownsman a couple of days ago, so look out for them coming on TV soon! Also, the Countryfile episode that was filmed here recently was shown on BBC1 last Sunday night (20th June), so if you didn't catch it, look it up on BBC iPlayer!

The Social Side
The World Cup has been the main focus for the past couple of weeks really. All of the Wardens and most of the boatmen joined in for the sweepstake (in which I got Germany), which makes watching football more fun! Also, we’re collecting the Panini World Cup stickers for the sticker album (which we took apart and stuck all over the walls! A few days ago, all of the wardens went over to the mainland, as we were going to go and visit a site where we could see some rare birds. Unfortunately, we had boat trouble and were late getting into Seahouses, so we couldn’t go. Instead, we went to visit the National Trust’s colony of breeding Little Terns, which is at a site not too far from here. It was a very nice day and we had a lovely walk on a sandy beach to get there. Yesterday we ran into the Brownsman boys while we were in Seahouses, so we all went for an Indian together and then for a few drinks. Good to see them once in a while! Tommorow night we are all going to go fishing with the Boatmen! They’re going to pick us all up in one of the visitor boats and then we’re going to drive out to sea, have a BBQ, drink some drinks and some people are going to fish…not sure that I want to though, but I’ve never done it before so don’t know what it’s like.

In Other News…
I’ve been driving the Zodiac boat a lot more, which is a good thing really, as it gets me more used to doing it and more used to just being in the boat! Also gives me more hours of driving experience, so it all adds up! Some researchers have been here in the past couple of weeks, looking and the diet of the Grey Seals that we have here. This involves collecting seal poo. A few wardens volunteered for this job, as it is a good thing to have done and to have on your CV, but I was not one of them! It has been decided that David is now the Senior Warden on Inner Farne, so when Steely (Head Warden) isn’t here, David motivates us to actually do some work! Also, I need flip flops! I’ve decided that many activities here would be much easier to do if I was wearing flip flops instead of walking boots, as it doesn’t matter if flip flops get wet. Unfortunately though, I can’t find any size 5 flip flops in Seahouses. However, I don’t want to get my boots wet, so today (since I was helping the boats during visitor hours – a job where I always get soaked), I walked around barefoot. It was pretty good actually! I didn’t care about getting wet, and it was a hot sunny day so I could get away with it.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now. This post ended up being much longer than I’d originally intended, but I had forgotten just how much stuff happens here! Still enjoying it, looking forward to seeing friends and family soon!

Sunday 6 June 2010

Cliff Counts and Nest Counts

The past few days have been the busiest so far, as the majority of our time has been taken up with cliff counts and nest counts. Cliff counts involves using the Zodiac boat to go around all of the islands in the Inner Group and count how many nesting pairs of Shags, Kittiwakes, Razorbills, Guillemots and Cormorants there are. This is done over 10 days, with each person counting a different species each day. At the end of the 10 days, everybody wil have counted each species at least once. The highest count and the lowest count for each species are then taken away and an average is taken of those that are left. This average is taken as the total number of that species in the Inner Group. The same is done with the Outer Group of islands, which gives us the total number of breeding birds for each species on the Farne Islands. All of this started for the Inner Group on the 2nd June and involved getting up pretty early to go out and count things. It was pretty good though, as I had Shags, which are one of the easiest ones to count! Guillemots are the hardest as there are about 10,000 of them on the Inner Group alone!

Nest counts started on the 3rd June. Nest counts involves counting every single nest of every single species of bird that nests on the island (apart from those mentioned above). To do this, the whole of the island has to be checked with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that we count every single nest. The Brownsman team had their nest count day on the 3rd June. As nest counts take all day, me, Michael and Jamie had to go over to Staple Island to do their visitor work, and then speed all the way back to Inner Farne to do our visitor work over here! So a very long day all round. Nest counts on Inner Farne started the very next day, so we were all up early again, for a 6am start. we had to rope off all of the island into transects so that we could know for certain that we had covered the entire island. The Brownsman team came over to Inner Farne in the afternoon and did our visitor work for us (as well as doing their own in the morning) so that we could continue with our counts. Unfortunately for us though, we didn't manage to get the whole of the island done in one day, so we continued with counts all of yesterday morning, which I helped with even though it was my day off! I then relaxed in the afternoon while the others did visitor work, and helped with nest counts again in the evening. We still have a small amount of the island that we need to cover, but unfortunately there is alot of fog today, so we can't do it this morning. Hopefully the evening will be better!

For the past few days whilst we've been involved in nest counts, we haven't been able to do any cliff counts, apart from yesterday. Therfore we've only done 2 out of 10, and have many to go! The one this morning had to be cancelled as well as the nest counts, again due to the fog. But hopefull tomoro will be a nicer day so that we can get it all done! During nest counts, I took many photos of cute chicks of many species with my brand new camera that my dad sent to me! So I shall be putting those up on here very soon!

Tuesday 1 June 2010

Big News!

Big news from the Farnes today! We had pretty strong Southerly winds all day today, and as a results we had a very rare bird fly over the islands! A Black Kite flew over at about 4.30pm today, whilst being mobbed by many many waders. This is the first time this bird has ever been seen on the Farne Islands, as it is pretty rare in England! So a brilliant sighting! A couple of photos were taken by Mark, so I will get them on here asap! In addition to this, we had Midlands Today (a news programme from the Midlands) out here filming live today! Luckily we weren't interviewed or anything, but was good all the same! Apart from that not much has been happening here. This should have been our busiest weekend of the year, but very strong Northerly winds prevented anyone from getting to the islands the entire weekend and stranded us out here, which isn't too good as we're now running out of food a little bit...but we'll be going to Seahouses tomoro if all goes to plan, so not too much of a tragedy. Thats all there is to report at the moment, so here are the photos I've been promising!

One of the first Arctic Terns to nest showing off her 2 eggs