Boat trip, bird nerds and a bouncing black bunny
After a spell of weather that allowed great spotting conditions earlier in the week, our field equipment hasn’t seen much action in the last few days. We took drastic action and went out on the water for an hour to deploy some acoustic equipment (successfully we hope, but more of this in a later blog!).
Thanks for all your help with preparing and dropping the TPOD in the Minch, Ian!
The water was a little choppy. The sun streaming through the clouds and over the imposing mountains that backdrop Gairloch made for a photogenic trip. We were treated to our first fly by - a great skua that appeared right alongside the boat, and flew back and forth between us and a fishing boat. Shortly after, a fulmar passed by and then settled on the water behind us.
Skua on a mission
Pretty fulmar
I was excited by the low flying terns (memories of voyages to the Antarctic and seeing them there having just completed their incredible journeys across oceans) and then we had a low flying fast moving shag!
That's a tern up for the books
A shag in a hurry
We had our fingers crossed for a puffin but it wasn’t to be. However we weren’t disappointed to get a close up view of small groups of both resting razorbills and guillemots. They are much easier to tell apart from the boat than they are at such a distance from our survey platform on the shore! They were all a real pleasure to see.
A spectacle wearing guillemot
Can I borrow your razorbill?
Following the press release on the Joint Warrior minke whale incident that went out last week (which you’ve all read of course!), we conducted an interview at the local radio station, 2 Lochs Radio, the smallest radio station in the UK, but hopefully with a large following!
On a different note we had a wildlife encounter of an unusual kind… Our top canine research assistant has a taste for big fat juicy carrots (Yes, it does seem like a bizarre favourite for a big white german shephard!). So there are a variety of orange nub ends lying around the garden. We were at first surprised to see a very small and acrobatic black rabbit in the garden of an evening. But there’s no prize for guessing what is attracting it… Watching it flip and jump around the garden is just as sweet (and a bit hilarious!) as watching Kila contentedly munching on the subject of both their happiness.
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But kudos to the people who did their best to save him.