Every season we're fortunate to have several volunteers staying with us and helping out across the reserve. Here's a first Hello from one who's signed up with the seabird monitoring team. You'll be getting regular updates from her so keep reading.
Late May
Hello! And welcome to my first blog post whilst I am here at RSPB Bempton Cliffs. My name is Katharine Kite and I am the residential volunteer here for 3 ½ months working with the seabird monitoring team. Our job is to try and gather information on guillemots, razorbills, gannets and kittiwakes so we can work out how good, or bad, a breeding season they have had.
As you may well know, seabirds are one of the most at risk groups of birds on the planet, for many and various reasons, and so this work is very important. This kind of monitoring has been going on here for some years now, so we have a pretty good idea of which species are doing well and not so well. Gannets, for example, are doing well and their population is increasing at Bempton. Other species, particularly kittiwakes, have had some poorer breeding years and so the value of long-term monitoring is that you can really get a good idea of what the trends are and then try to work out what can be done to help the situation.
So, over the next few weeks, I shall be trying to give you a flavour of what I do as part of this much bigger effort, which involves many hours of many volunteers’ time. And as I am new to this particular type of monitoring, I shall be sharing the thrills and spills of my experiences! So, I think it would be best to start with the thrills which I have tried to capture through my new skills of ‘Digiscoping’ where you attach a smartphone to a little attachment to the telescope and can take pictures of the magnified image.
I was amazed to see a guillemot try and incubate two eggs! That really was a thrill!
Then I too, along with lots of other people, love to see the puffins.
And then today, on the gannet plot I monitor at Jubilee, I saw my first gannet chick fresh out of the egg! I must have been fresh out because a) it was really small and b) the egg it emerged from was still under the adult. That was nest number 48! It’s not a particularly clear picture because it was on the far side of the cliff face, but you can just make out its beak and two dark areas where its eyes are!
So, I’ll leave it there for the first blog and look forward to filling you in on a bit more detail of how we go about the actual monitoring as many people ask how it is done.
So, until next time. Happy spotting!
Early June
It’s been a bad week weather-wise and we have got behind with our monitoring. We normally monitor auks every three days but this gale force windy spell has put us behind. However, we braved Beaufort scale 6 northerlies today to try and get an idea of what’s happening. And, when my eyes weren’t watering from facing into wind, I saw quite a few chicks, both guillemot and razorbill.
There are also quite a few pairs of razorbill which had had eggs, but those eggs are no more. Whether they have been ‘got’ by the crows, who pull the incubating adult off their egg by their tails, then go in to pick up and make off with the egg, I know not. But I have seen this happen twice. It might also be that the egg was knocked off the cliff when the adults change over, the incubating bird being relieved of its duties by the mate for some R+R (food, a wash and a stretch).
So, looking forward to some better weather and more chicks! Here’s a little something to keep you going. I was scanning the cliff with my binoculars and looked at the back of a razorbill as it sat on its ‘plot’. I wondered what was the grey blob on its wing. As these birds are normally well manicured (except when they are covered in poo from birds above), the bit of wing should have been black. On closer inspection with the telescope I saw this....
Complete with ‘egg tooth’ on the end of its bill. This little tooth is used by the chick to bash away at the inside of the egg to break itself free! So this chick really was fresh out of the egg as these egg teeth disappear after a couple of days.
Looking forward to more and watching them grow.