So much to learn...

Welcome to a guest post from Mike - Seabird Research Assistant.

Hello all. At the end of last season my blog posting privileges expired and this season the team have been doing such a great job that I never felt the need to get them restored, until now.

One of my favourite things about the seabird work that we do here at Bempton is that there is still so much to learn. I was reminded of this most recently by Razorbill MA82 430.

On 2 July, as I was drinking much needed coffee and checking my emails after an early start with a seabird tagging team from the RSPB STAR project, a message flashed up from our indomitable Gannet monitoring volunteer Linda – she’d spotted a colour ringed Razorbill at Breil Nook, Flamborough. Now there are a LOT of razorbills at Breil, but I thought I’d keep an eye out for it just in case.

A few days later I bumped in to Linda out on the cliffs and she showed me exactly where she had seen the bird, but I still didn’t have high hopes. Needles and haystacks kept running through my mind. Nonetheless, I continued to scan the area on my subsequent visits to Breil – I am there 4 days a week. And then on 7 July there it was – a Razorbill with a green ring above a metal ring on its left leg. I kept watching and saw a flash of red on the right leg. This was the bird! I kept on it, hoping to see the distinctive numbers or letters usually engraved on a colour ring so it can be read in the field. There were none. Instead I saw something even more interesting – a geolocator, a tiny tag designed to record where the bird is, attached to the red ring on the right leg. Curiouser and curiouser.

I spent some more time scoping the bird and managed to read part of the number on the BTO metal ring, but that was it. An interesting (to me anyway) fact about the metal rings used on Razorbills (and Guillemots) are not actually rings, but are triangular. They are designed so that one side rests flat against the rock the birds frequent and that side has no writing on it. The rock wears away the writing on a traditional ring.

Now there are not that many people likely to have been fitting geolocators to Razorbills in the UK. So I emailed a contact who does seabird research on the Isle of May – who confirmed that the bird might well have been ringed there. But we would need the full BTO ring number to be sure. The following day, Sophia I were back at Breil, and so was the Razorbill – right in the same spot. We spent half an hour, as it started to rain, scoping the bird and agreed on the number – MA82 430. That afternoon I emailed my contact from the May who confirmed that the bird had been ringed there in July 2013. It would be great if we could catch the bird to get data off the geolocator, but it has cunningly chosen a spot where this isn’t possible.

Since then I have seen the bird at the same spot a few more times, and suspect that it bred there. So we have an Isle of May bird which moved to Flamborough, or a Flamborough bird which checked out the May before deciding to breed here after all. How cool is that. And how many more Razorbills move colony or scout other colonies? And do Guillemots do the same thing? What about Puffins? There’s still so much to discover about the life histories and ecology of our seabirds.