13th - 17th July

The temperatures here over the past few days haven't quite hit the same dizzying heights as further down south, but it has been slightly warmer and a little less windy. In fact, a couple of the days it was even warm enough to go out with just one jumper on!

In a similar fashion to the last blog post, birding has been slow once again. The only bird of particular note being an unseasonable House Martin that was seen flying around Neven on the 15th.

Elsewhere, we have mainly been continuing our monitoring of breeding birds round the island, carrying out a coastal Fulmar count on the 15th. There were 170 individuals sat on nests, with either a chick or an egg, a seemingly lower number to last year. But with the inland nests still left to count, it may be that more individuals have been preferring the shelter of the inland dykes and roofs over being battered in the near constant winds on the coast.

Big build ups of Kittiwake have continued to occur at the north end, with 603 individuals on the 13th, and then over 1000 on the 15th. Numbers of Purple Sandpiper have also started to increase over the past few days, with 41 individuals around the coast in census area F on the 15th.

We colour ringed another Curlew chick on the 16th, but keep seeing more around the island so we will hopefully be adding more to our total over the next few days. A Common Tern also showed up on Gretchen on the 16th.

The night of the 17th we put our Storm Petrel tapes out to hopefully draw a few in to the island. We ended up with around 20 birds flying round our heads, making it more disappointing not to be able to ring them this year.

It seems the moth trap has been producing the most interest over the past few days, after finally getting some good trapping nights. A Current Pug caught on the 11th later turned out to be a first record for the island, and a Purple Bar caught on the night of the 17th was a fourth for the island. We've also been seeing good numbers of Magpie Moth, Ghost Moth and Cetaceous Hebrew Character, along with lots of the more commonly trapped species.

With calm weather set for the week ahead, hopefully we start to see a few early migrants make their way through. 

Kittiwakes

Purple Bar