As you can tell from the recent flurry of blog posts- the start of the week mostly involved making sure Iain and Andrew were up to date with all our ‘social media outlets’ (terrible phrase!) and making sure they were all signed up to do blog posts, add stuff to our Facebook and post on Twitter. Thankfully they’ve fully grasped the technology (and partly grasped Twitter...) so they’ll be helping me out with writing blog posts every week and letting you know what’s been going on at the reserve.
The weather’s been our enemy this week, with absolutely pouring rain and very cold temperatures on Monday and Tuesday. The wardens have mostly been out counting trees in the Rookery (genuinely harder than it sounds when there’s nearly 700 of them and they’re not growing in straight lines, the trick is apparently to mark them with chalk, or pasta stuck in the roots, as you go), and checking to see which ones can stay and which may need felling. They’ve also been doing a lot of general winter tidying work and coming back very wet and muddy, especially yesterday afternoon. I’ve mostly been planning events at Strathbeg and Troup Head (“Gannet Week”) for early next year and next summer, which seems like a very long way away at the moment, and researching fun facts about Stoats and Red-throated Divers for the press department.
How many trees can you see?
The grey, speckly bit in the middle is usually water...
Bird-wise we’re well into winter now and even the hardy little Chiffchaff in front of the centre seems to have moved on. We have a had two huge lifts of geese in the past two days, and the low ground on Tuesday morning was a carpet of Pink-feet so we’re hoping we’ll get a big number when we count on Sunday morning. We did have a suprise addition to our Year List when a check to see if we'd already recorded Little Auk revealed that somehow we'd forgotten to add our common Guillemot. It's clearly a bit out of sequence but brings us officially up to 182 different bird species for the year.
Andrew had a very good Otter sighting from the centre this morning. Sunday’s Bittern hasn’t been reported again, but as you know they can easily disappear into the reedbeds here so it’s still worth keeping an eye out from Fen or Bay Hide if you’re visiting in the next week or so.