...at last, the visit in 2021 gets closer.

Already two groups of others have visited Nan Ron in order to ring Storm Petrels. Our visit gets closer, with much anticipation following our Covid induced absence of 2020. So far twelve are billed to attend with four being new to island and nocturnal ringing. 

This year, following a small grant from the Seabird Group <www.seabirdgroup.org.uk> we shall be undertaking some stormie sexing studies, in addition to our usual biometrics and ageing. Sexing of storm petrels is 'challenging', to the extent that many do not undertake it, and ageing is subjective, so again missed. It is our hope that we can produce some guidelines and morphometrics (including photographs) to enable the ageing and sexing of storm petrels around the latitudes of northern Scotland.

....Barn Owl still eating...

 The ringers from Belvide have visited Nan Ron over the last week or so. Averaging about 300 new birds a night with about 20% more due to retraps, including some Norwegian ringed birds, they also collected some Barn Owl pellets and looked for rings. They found nine Storm Petrel rings of birds originally ringed on Nan Ron - in 2006, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016(3), 2017, and 2019. If convention is followed all of the birds, except the bird from 2019, must have been adults breeding on Nan Ron.

So the Barn Owls are still present on the island, and they are still eating Storm Petrels as part of their diet. Hopefully, might be able to update this.....

A new year, hopefully with another visit

 Three new recoveries just received. All three birds were ringed on Nan Ron over the period 30Jul-2Aug 2019 and strangely, probably indicating they are all wandering juveniles of non-sufficient maturity to breed, all were re-trapped at Twinyess, North Ronaldsay on;

25 June (2757196); 10 July (2749012); 14 Aug (2757109). Needless to say 'distance' was the same for all, 141km, but days between capture and recovery were 328, 346 and 379 respectively.

Just to keep you interested

Posted by

Wendy James on Twitter @wendy_TRG

Storm Petrel 2674680 has been exploring the Welsh coast! Ringed by Teifi Ringing Group at #Mwnt in 2017, it was at Porth Iago in 2018 then this year was caught by Pembs RG at Wooltack Point on 11th July, then just 9 days later was retrapped on Bardsey Island

...it's good if you have a breeding colony

where you can put on GPS tags AND get them off again.
Work undertaken in Spain (Benidorm) with Mediterranean Storm-Petrels has tracked 22 complete foraging trips of individuals from the colony (and back again). Foraging trips lasted 1-4.5 days taking in an impressive 303-1726km - much further than previously thought.

Birds were foraging over deep sea areas of the Alboran Sea and the Cartagena Canyons. If we took these figures and looked at sea depth I wonder how far, and for how long, European Storm Petrels from Nan Ron would forage.

Ref: http://animaldemography.blogspot.com/

Rotger, A., Sola, A., Tavecchia, G. & Sanz-Aguilar, A. (2021). Foraging far from home: GPS-tracking of Mediterranean Storm-petrels Hydrobates pelagicus melitensis reveals long-distance foraging movements. Ardeola, 68: 3-16.

C19, who'd have know?

As we are all currently confined to home territories outings have had to be postponed, cancelled, or put into abeyance. Our annual visit to Nan Ron, although still some weeks away, may actually be caught up in the tail end of the current situation - and we may not be able to visit this year.
I have had a look though all of our visits over the last years to find out when the latest visit in the year was made, and Stormies were still being caught. The answer was the 14th Sept, so I/we must live in hope.
While looking back through these years I started to play with some of the figures. Below is a graph which shows the annual totals, in blue, and the cumulative total in red. This relates to new birds caught only.
Since 1999 when we actually started to target Storm Petrels we have rung, on average, c1600 birds per annum. The best years to date have been 1999, 2004 and 2005 when over 2400 new birds were ringed. Last year, 2019, we rang 2358; but we should bear in mind that we now not only ring but collect full biometrics on most birds and, where informative, we photograph as well.

To date we have rung 34,246 birds.

Breeding Storm Petrel survey

I've just received from Danni (Thompson) at JNCC a map showing the survey locations looking for breeding Storm Petrels on Nan Ron. This was undertaken in 1995. It is our intention under Danni's guidance to resurvey the complete island this year for comparison. We're going to be busy......