Apologies to any readers who saw this blog pop up yesterday briefly and then disappear! I wrote the text and then had issues loading the video so in the end had to delete the lot and start again today!
It's been a busy day of seabird monitoring so it's nearly 10pm before I'm getting round to doing this but the good news is I'm still in time to post something for World Oceans Day - and what better subject matter than Manx shearwaters. True masters of the ocean these birds only come ashore to breed. Every year they make a 14,000 mile round trip from their breeding grounds here in the UK to the coast of Argentina. Over 90% of the world's population breed on islands around our shores with over half of them right here in Pembrokeshire on Skokholm, Skomer and of course Ramsey
At this time of year birds are incubating their single egg. They do this, in shifts, for a mammoth 51 days. The chick then takes a further 70 days to fledge. The video below is from one our study nest boxes. We have a few pairs fitted with miniature tracking devices called geolocators to allow us to study their movements at sea and over winter. I was waiting for one of this pair to return so I could swap it's device. Rather than disturb them every day by looking inside the boxes I set up trail cameras and check the footage each day to see if they swap. If they do I pop up and change the device, thus only disturbing them once.
The bird in this box had been incubating for 5 days. I was beginning to think the camera was playing up but sure enough the night before last the partner finally returned! The video shows the bird returning, the pair greeting each other (one inside the box one in the entrance), one bird having a tidy up and then leaving, probably desperate for a good feed.
Small confession on my part - I didn't have my glasses on when processing the video and mixed up my 'males and females'! Sexs are identical to look at but the male has a much higher pitched call than the females lower, more rhythmic call (listen carefully and you will hear the difference). When looking at the small video in the corner of the editing software screen I thought the bird inside was the female but if you look carefully you can clearly see the bird outside the box is making the female call - by the time I'd realised my mistake there was no going back as i'd deleted the original files - anyway....when watching the video just swap all the 'him / he / male' references for 'her / she / female' and vice versa! Sorry!