By Jessie Dermody
A busy day for me today, beginning with a trek up to the northeast of the island to monitor the fulmar colony. I set off a little later than I had planned, so I walked as fast as I could and scrambled down through the bracken to the survey point. I counted 52 Fulmars sitting in the colony, with another four on the wing. No visible chicks yet, although there was a Greater Black Back Gull with a chick on top of the rock above the colony. We have also spotted a Peregrine chick outside its nest in this area too! My job was to photograph the monitored sections of the colony so Emma can do a proper nest count at a later date. I also get a general count to go into the log book for that day. After my task was completed, I headed back to gannets bay for a seal disturbance survey.
An undisturbed seal resting 100m from any boats or snorkellers. By Jessie Dermody
Unfortunately, there was a lot of seal disturbance today. Two boats moored in gannets bay and sent out snorkellers and divers who seemed to not know how to snorkel with seals without disturbing them. There were several instances where seals were scared off the rocks by swimmers coming to close, as well as many seals which were prevented from hauling out by the people and boats in the water. In the screen capture below, you can see a very disturbed seal looking directly at the snorkellers. A few seconds later in this video, the seal moves rapidly off its rock into the water, wasting valuable energy as it will now have to search for another place to rest. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, disturbing seals while they are hauled out can have very serious and long-lasting effects. Disturbing female seals during summer can be particularly bad, as they may be pregnant at this time of year, and any disturbance will waste energy that they would normally have used to feed the pup inside of them.
A screengrab of one of the videos of seal disturbance taken today.
After draining my camera battery filming incidents of seal disturbance, I made my way to Jenny's Cove to run the seabird station for visitors there. A lot of the visitors today were very excited to see the islands auks up close through the scope. A few of them spotted some Ravens flying past the cove! There were also plenty of Fulmar and Kittiwake flying around the cove today. As 3pm rolled around, I headed back to the lodge to crash on the sofa and read before dinner and wildlife log in the evening. We had reports of 285 Manx Shearwater, 4 Gannets, 2 Black-headed gulls, 5 Storm Petrels, 12 Curlew and a Cormorant on todays Oldenburg crossings. We have also had at least one Grayling butterfly reported at log for the past few nights.
Today's Grayling. Photo by Chloe Langmead