Wednesday 3 June 2020

Well well, the weather took a change today, the rain overnight was very welcome for the vegetable patch in the garden. It was very slightly drizzly all day, with the wind picking up to 35mph, and it was a rather biting northerly. Lately, the ground in even the lowest parts of the island has been baked hard by the relentless heat and sun. Down at the farm, Gareths' extensive potato field has been manually watered regularly so they have been thriving despite the dry weather. It was a good day to crack on with project work as it was quiet for migrant birds, and the condition generally made birding difficult in general.

On the way to the South End during the morning census, a search for the Red-backed Shrike was unsuccessful, unfortunately. So perhaps just a one day wonder, but we live in hope that there will be a chance to see another one!

The drizzly and windy weather kept a lot of the small birds down in the bushes, the only notable difference was three Blackcaps that were flitting around the farm, which haven't been recorded in recent days. Five Sanderlings on Solfach were very nice to see, one in winter plumage, but the rest were in their breeding plumage, meaning these could well be different individuals to yesterday, there certainly wasn't a winter plumaged one recorded yesterday...

The afternoon was spent doing the burrow census, but also finding active burrows to play a call into to work out a correction factor for the burrow census, so George was busy doing this. Sam is censusing the Pen Cristin burrows at the moment, quite a bit trickier than the burrows that are situated along walls, as its harder to work out where you have already been when they are just strewn over a hillside. Whilst on Pen Cristin, one of the Chough nests was seen to have two fledgling chicks hopping around outside the entrance! Exciting stuff!

George swiftly checked 50 burrows, both behind the Obs, Pen Cristin and the North West Fields for occupying Manxies, just as the wind and rain were picking up, Sam joined him in the North West Fields and on the way back saw that the wind turbine at Nant has been erected.

The evening was spent entering numbers into log as always, as well as sorting out the ringing books from the days of seabird ringing recently. It looks like the windy weather is here to stay for a little while, so we'll see how this affects the bird numbers...



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