Bird Sightings

Hi everyone!

I’m Maddie, one of the volunteers currently helping out the warden team during this busy time of year. I am an early-career seabird scientist with a passion for remote island conservation work. This has taken me to some incredible places over the past few years, including Ascension Island, the Isles of Scilly, and Shetland. I first came to Lundy last May as part of a visiting RSPB research team. I only spent a week here, but that was plenty of time to fall in love with the island, and I am really excited to be back for a whole month this year! I’ve been especially enjoying the luxuries of the cosy volunteer accommodation, access to hot showers, and evenings at the tavern, since I’ll be spending the rest of the summer in a tent on Mousa- an uninhabited island in Shetland where I will be GPS tracking Storm Petrels.

My first week here has been incredible, with work days including seabird monitoring, chatting to visitors at the Jenny’s Cove “puffin station”, butterfly transects, and my personal highlight being the busy nights of Manx Shearwater ringing.

This morning, I joined Thomas for a very windy census, with strong easterlies meaning that there wasn’t much bird activity around Millcombe, but we were lucky enough to hear a male Cuckoo calling. Kistvane Pool yielded a lovely Dunlin, and our wader success continued with a beautiful pair of Golden Plover posing on the freshly mown grass of the airfield. A quick glimpse of a Crossbill flitting out of a gorse bush at Acklands Pond was another highlight. In the afternoon, we headed over to the Manx Shearwater colony to check on the progress of our birds in nest boxes- we now have lots of incubating birds so we will leave them to it until early/mid June, when we predict that chicks will be starting to hatch. A visiting work party from the Lundy Field Society reported good numbers of Puffins from Jenny's Cove, and the Channel Wagtail is still around – seen in Barton Field today along with a White Wagtail.