Entries by Pine Eisfeld

I have been reminded again yesterday, that the thing about fieldwork is that one just cannot control all variables. After consulting various weather websites, checking out wind speeds, wind directions and swell heights and conferring with colleague Simon and skipper Davy, we had to come to the conclusion that we would not be able to use up all of our survey days after all, as we simply just could not control the weather (oh well, I’ll work on that for the future). We had planned to survey up here until the 19^th of June (tomorrow), but the weather God definitely has other ideas as the weather forecast until Saturday is winds with speeds up to 18mph from a westerly direction making spotting of small cetacean fins impossible. So I officially called the survey over last night. We did manage to do 7 survey days with between 3.5 and 10.5 hours on effort though!

Together with the fabulous Sealife volunteers, I collected the gear from the boat, got it cleaned and stored away, mouse proof, at the Wildlife Centre. That is us done!

These past two weeks went by very quickly and some days have been quite surreal with no cetacean sightings whatsoever! A friend from the west coast who runs wildlife tours there has confirmed that he too found the seas to be eerily empty of cetaceans, so we wonder where they have all gone to…

Before I conclude this blog entry, I want to use this space to profoundly thank everyone involved in the survey (in no particular order): my colleagues Nicola and Laura for all their help, advise, kind words, encouraging smiles, heartfelt laughs and shared space, my colleague Alice for training up the Centre volunteers, my other colleague Alice for giving us her excellent car (that car was a Godsend as it ferried around 7 people!), the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Sealife volunteers Clare, Jenny, Adam and Scott who’ve already inputted ALL the bird data we collected (WOW!!!!), the fabulous Wildlife Centre volunteers Kirsty and Jonathan for giving up their days off to help us out, Jill from SNH and Hywel from RSPB for helping with our cetacean rota and birds respectively, Ian from RSPB for organising volunteers to help out with the bird watching, Simon for coming up from Aberdeen to find out what was wrong with the hydrophone and then coming back and helping out again, skipper Davy for all his advise and endless knowledge about the weather and for bringing us back safely into harbour each day, Iris (who broke her foot! Get well soon!) for all her help, her kind words and laughs and for generally looking after all of us so well! Thank you everyone, because without you it would not have been possible!

Today, the weather was too rough, so we stayed on shore and decided to take the Sealife volunteers to the Wildlife Center. We had just taken a closer look at the exhibition and the new Harbour Garden and - for us – newly re-arranged shop when we met colleague Alice outside on “shore watch” talking to some visitors about the work WDCS does up in Scotland. She had just taken these visitors on a tour of the ice house and left us in charge of the big eyes binoculars when an osprey made its appearance dropping into the water and taking off with a fish in its claws. Brilliant sight! Then Scott said peaking through the big eyes: “I can see a black fin out there!” And he was so right! A small group of about 4 dolphins started to frolic just outside the river mouth to the joy of about 25 school children from an elementary school in Elgin, our Sealife volunteers and all the other visitors at the center!







We followed them with the big eyes all the way through the bay until we lost them in the haze and the waves. Excellent! After a refreshing lunch, Alice took us round the center and into the ice house, impressing the volunteers with whale bones and orca teeth and squeaky dolphin sounds from the sonobuoy in the bay.







On our way back to the cottage I spotted some dolphins just off of Buckpool jumping through the waves. We watched them for about 10 minutes until they had gone and all of us went home with a big grin on our faces! Maybe we will see them tomorrow when we go out?

Right, here we are again, up in the Moray Firth for our summer survey for cetaceans. We (Nicola, Laura and I) have help from four staff from the Sealife Centres all around Britain: Adam, Claire, Jenny and Scott and sporadically from the residential Wildlife Center volunteers (Jonathan, Pippa, Kirsty and Dianne) as well as from some RSPB and SNH folk. After a couple of teething problems with our lovely huge cottage in Portknockie (like finding out that the landlord's relative's daughter had held a party in the house the night before we moved in and did a horrible job of cleaning up afterwards and the cleaner having to come round again to do the job today, or that the TalkTalk box that was supposed to connect us to the internet didn't work and Nicola spending most of the day on the phone to the provider and Laura hidden under a jumper in the garden to use her dongle) we eventually settled in quite well.

Today found us waking up to a blue sky covered by white clouds. After a quick breakfast in the garden I trained up the Sealife volunteers and bombarded them with a quiz at the end about the different cetacean, seal and bird species they might encounter while up here afterwards. Then Laura and I set out to collect the equipment from the Wildlife Center in Spey Bay and set everything up on the boat. As we were storing things away and setting dictaphones and watches to the right times and dates, Davy, the skipper of the Gemini Explorer came to us and asked quietly where the hydrophone was. The hydrophone?!? Isn't it supposed to be in the shed here at the harbour? No, they had brought it back to the Wildlife Center at the end of last year. Ok, great. Laura and I set off to hunt for the hydrophone which turned out to be in the shed next to the volunteer house (where the mice live that we encountered on last year's survey when retrieving our equipment). So far so good, back to the boat and resuming to set everything up which took us just about another 3 hours. Home, food, and now sleep as we have decided to give it a go tomorrow!