Wednesday 15 April 2015



After a long mild winter , I was hoping that the spring migration would be somewhat better, but with clear nights . A lot of our migration is going overhead with only a scattering of birds making landfall though it seems migration has been very slow this year with birds being held up in Africa and southern Europe due to weather conditions. We can only hope that the next couple weeks get better . It has been that slow that I'm not even tried for swallows of an evening I was hoping to get up to Alderney this weekend with the winds all week being a light force 1 to 2 and from the south the south-east but as always the forecast changes to the weekend with northerly winds predicted 5 to 6 will have to cancel my trip fingers crossed for next weekend but hey no a more cheerful note we did manage today to get up to the humps with the help of  the Guernsey Sea fisheries, who took a team of four of us to Godin, we left St Peter Port harbour at about 8.50 and headed to the humps on the way up . We passed jethou and Herm
we managed to count at least 18 puffins on the water. As we got closer to the humps. There is also a good number of guillemots rafting nearby. After about 20 min. We held just of Godin on the Leopard S the sea fisheries boat while they launched the rip myself. Paul Catherine and Vic were put ashore once ashore, we had a small discussion on how to approach the cormorants as this some of the chicks were quite big, it was decided that we would take one nest at a time and and tried to round the bigger chicks back towards the nests. This seem to work well as we approach each nest and with keeping the birds tight to each other. We would place a blanket over four or five birds. This is the first time we have used this method and it definitely helps keep the birds calm while I metal ring and Paul putting the colour rings on. We moved slowly through the nesting site keeping a tight ring round the birds as yet I do not have the exact number of birds that we managed to ring as Catherine was taking the ring numbers and the colouring as myself and Paul rung the birds Vic had brought some slate and some broken patio slabs with him so that we could try to give the common terms chicks somewhere to hide and give them some protection from the gulls after last year. Fingers crossed they return

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