Been a funny week for birds really. Strong winds have prevented us from opening all of our 30 nets most days, whilst a general lack of birds has also meant reduced catches.
As we feared, the week was not helped by having two elderly ladies stay, who had given every indication that they were experienced at how to extract birds from the mist nets. The first morning with them made us quickly realise that this was not the case!! Not only did they struggle with finding out which side of the net the birds had entered from, one of them could not identify a Blackbird from 1 foot away!!!
Coupled with their generally poor idenification skills was their ability to act like what they were - retired school teachers!! We have expected to get marks out of 10 at the end of the week! Some funny moments with them though - trying to get one of them to understand the principles of getting change when paying for the accomodation was like a 1980's comedy sketch; money passing backwards and forwards as they argued with each other about it!!
Saving the best until last, when they left on Friday they headed off to West Harbour for the 0930 ferry, which was in East Harbour, a whole 300m away!! Luckily Monica and Tore who crew the ferry noticed and Tore nipped over the fetch them:
Tore: 'The ferry is in East Harbour'
Elderly lady: 'How would you know that!!!'
Tore: 'Because I'm driving it!!'
Despite some poor numbers of birds we have noticed the start of the autumn movement of species such as Blackcap, Garden Warbler and Willow Warbler, as well as catching a couple more Tree Pipit. Yellow Wagtail have started to move through also and we caught one which we gave to Monica to ring, as she had never done one, in fact it was only the 19th ever ringed here since ringing started in 1978, and two of those were caught by us last year.
On the subject of Monica, she has started her new job on the ferry and when she is on her week at work she stays here at the Obs with us. A very happy lady and much less stress than her previous job - congratulations, a great result!!!
Kay has been out and about taking some pictures of a few of the many pieces of artwork that are on the island - pictures below. This afternoon went fishing on the rocks behind the Obs, a terribly long way to go fishing - about 300m. Caught a cod and Kay got a short-spined scorpion fish - lovely looking thing.
Finally, is anyone able to identify this catapillar????
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