Storm Petrels of 2023

Wind and rain inflenced our ringing activities more than our AI precautions did. In the end we 'lost' two nights and spent two nights on the beach - to avoid the wind. We only managed one night on what is one of our more productive sites.

To cut a long story short our captures were the worst on record for over a decade. Having taken, and expected to use, a large number of the 2500 rings taken we only managed 152 new birds, 9 UK recaptures and one Norwegian ringed bird! In any previous year we would have caught this number in a couple of hours.

Night-time ringing station

Ringing storm petrels and taking biometrics and photographs

Our capture rate was typical of other sites around the UK. The Welsh coast, other parts of Scotland, Devon and some sites in Ireland were recording lower capture rates - in one instance in Devon a night of nothing at all! 

Why was this? Obviously the first thing that springs to mind is AI (storm petrels being essentially pelagic may hide mass deaths at sea), however some live sampling of petrels at Mousa returned that all were negative for AI. The next option is the reported and unusally high sea temperatures. The thinking here is that the food source of plankton/krill is considerably further north in cooler waters and that petrels staying with their food source are then much (much) further from land precluding succesful breeding. As such many have not attempted breeding and are therefore not coming to land (to be caught). Let's hope this is the case, next year may be able to answer this question.

However, out of this the lower catch rate there were other benefits. Currently we are trying to build a mechanism for being able to sex storm petrels (nearly all are not). So, with lower numbers, we were able to take a full set of biometrics, photograph, examine for brood patches and take feather samples (under license) on virtually all birds to collect data which may eventually lead to guidelines for phenotypically assigning sex to storm petrels.

An envelope containing plucked feathers and an underwing photograph of the same bird to determine the extent of underwing 'white'.

The Team this Year.

James, Ailsa, Lydia, Liz, Rachel

Sophie, Bob, Peter, Steph

(missing Julia, taking the photo, Tanya and Lora)

With thanks as always to Jean and Andy for transporting us to/from the island.

2023 - a return.

 Following our enforced absence last year - due to all ringing activities being suspended due to Avian Influenza - we managed to get on site this year. It came with caveates though - Nature Scotland said there was to be no ringing of Great Skuas (they have been hard hit by AI), and we had to implement a biosafety procedure to ensure we didn't exacerbate any AI issues. 

That said twelve of us made the journey north to continue our long-term ringing project and this year, besides ringers, we invited along several Wildlife Conservation /Entomology students. 

On the island itself not much was different regarding the houses - a few walls had lost some stones and a few more roof tiles had dropped off. Elsewhere though the weather had created some bigger changes. A new gully to the sea had 'opened up' on the western edge, with much peat-slippage elsewhere, and a large section of rock had broken away from what we call the Slab-Wall (NW corner of the island) to create additional access to the rock face. 

The new gully

The island was 'wet' this year with lots of running streams and large pools. 

Wandering about there were the typical dead Greylag Geese - youngsters taken out by the skua - as well as the requisite number of suicidal sheep (there are about 200 sheep on the island). Checking the island for signs of AI before ringing we discovered only one dead guillemot, one kittiwake and one puffin. There were 'bits' of puffin, fulmar and other seabirds, all within what we would have expected to find. 

Besides ringing storm petrels, see next post, we undertook our usual whole-island fulmar census (numbers slightly down) and did seek out skua chicks (without ringing) to determine what level of breeding had taken place (adult numbers on the island were down by about 70-80%). We also confirmed breeding of Greater Black-backed gull, Herring Gull, Fulmar, Shag, Cormorant, Guillemot, Ringed Plover (2 pairs), Meadow Pipit, Wren, and Oystercatcher, and suspected breeding of Rock Pipit, Rock Dove, Pied Wagtail, Kittiwake and Arctic Tern.

The nine Great Skua chicks found on the island.

With our students we increased our understanding of the island by undertaking Phase 1 and Phase 2 habitat surveys, took soil samples, performed a series of botanical quadrants and started a species list for invertebrates on the island. Unfortunately we did not undertake any moth-trapping this year. 

Although generally a week interrupted heavily by wind and rain we did have a couple of more typical days.