Todays blog post from residential volunteer Ben Crossman
The busy sea bird season is now fully under way with thousands of Guillemots, razorbills, Kittiwakes and fulmar hugging the cliffs. So with the sun shining we made the most of the late May weather in order to carry out a full colony count at Fowlsheugh.
Counting an entire colony of sea birds was not as daunting as I first thought. The trick is to divide the cliff in to as many small sections as possible and if in doubt recount that section until you get similar numbers as the previous count. With lots of people on hand to help, the counting did not take long and we were soon progressing along the cliff top. Unfortunately the winds picked up on the first day, and by early afternoon the count had to be abandoned, as it became too difficult to count accurately. Despite this, we were ahead of schedule, but still had the most difficult sections of cliff to count. On the second day, the main aim was to tackle the central section of the reserve, with a large unbroken section of cliff needing counting from a single viewpoint. Luckily there were plenty of cracks and fissures to break up the cliff face, making it possible to count small sections of cliff without loosing your place. Hence to say it was a long day, but by the end of it we had counted everything we could from the cliff top.
After two days of counting, we then had to count all the birds we could not see from the cliffs, by boat. So we set out from Stonehaven in the MV Lady Gale, castle charter boat, taking 15 minutes to reach the cliffs. The seas were calm and conditions were perfect for counting, with light winds and bright but overcast skies. Despite the calm conditions I was a little apprehensive, as this was the first time I had been out to sea on such as small boat and much of the talk before the trip had been on seasickness. I need not have worried, as despite a moderate swell near to the cliffs, I did not feel the least bit seasick. Rafts of Guillemots and Puffins greeted us as we made our way to the reserve, and the counting of birds on the cliff soon got underway. We were close enough to the cliff that it was easy to pick out individual birds however trying to keep binoculars steady on a rolling boat was a little more difficult. Thankfully, we did not have a very large section of cliff to count and it only took us an hour and a half to count everything. Then it was back to Molly’s for a well-deserved smoothie and a piece of cake.
Some of the many guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes that were counted last week!
Overall, we counted 44,700 Guillemots, 9439 Kittiwakes, 5195 razorbills, 160 Fulmar and 259 Herring gulls. Which compares’ to 50,556 Guillemots, 9454 Kittiwakes, 4632 Razorbills, 193 Fulmar and 214 Herring gulls were counted during the 2009 full colony count. We are currently double-checking some of the cliff sections which have big differences in bird numbers between 2009 and 2012 but it looks like we were accurate the first time round. So it looks like Razorbills are doing well, Kittiwakes are stable and everything else is declining, with a slightly worrying drop in Guillemot numbers.