On Wednesday the puffins were here, on Thursday they weren’t (apart from two who obviously missed the memo…)
Volunteers manned four of our viewpoints for several hours and a member of staff visited the fifth but it appears that the puffins have stayed true to their usual schedule and headed up north in the first week of August. So if you see a flash of black and orange skimming the North Sea now, the chances are that it is an oystercatcher instead. Whilst we’re sad that the puffins have left, we’re also very pleased with the numbers spotted in the last couple of months and hopeful that this bodes well for the national population figures.
Luckily we still have plenty of interesting birds to see on the cliffside. Some of the gannet chicks have taken the great, wobbly, leap of faith that we call fledging in the past few days, but there are many others that need a few more weeks to build up the confidence. Our volunteer gannet expert, Linda, came back from the cliffs yesterday beaming because she’d seen a young bird’s first flight. She said that she’d been watching one specific chick for hours but that it seemed to be frozen with its webbed feet half off the nest. Eventually it took one tentative step off and was immediately mobbed by the surrounding birds, forcing it to flap and jump. Fortunately, its innate flying knowledge kicked in and the young gannet soared, as gracefully as possible, away from the cliff edge.
For a coastal, cliff top, reserve we don’t do badly for migrant visitors and farmland or even wetland, birds. In the past week we’ve had sandwich terns flying by, peregrines hunting and had snipe reported near our tiny pond! We’d love any further sightings of the snipe to be reported in the visitor centre, as this really is rather unusual… Next week we will have the results of this years ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’ monitoring to report, which will tell us how well we’re doing in terms of the red and amber list birds. We already know that we provide a safe haven for several threatened species but this will give us an idea of numbers and breeding successes.
Chris Gomersall (rspb-images.com)
Rachael Tulloch (Warden Intern, RSPB Fairburn Ings)