With the wind gusting over 60mph it was a disturbed night as the windows rattled and the sea thumped into the cliffs below. No damage this morning and the livestock seem fine and were all accounted for. With high tide at around 9am we took shelter with our cameras to capture some images. Those of you who know Ramsey will recongnise today was not a good one if you were hoping for a boat!

The very unsettled weather continues with Storm Frank battering us as I type. This morning was very different though, there was even a sunrise worth getting up for!

It seems we aren't done with seal pups yet either. A new one was born around 17th December and has done well, it should wean no problem . Porth Lleuog is seeing adult numbers build as they undergo their winter moult. The rough weather has made life difficult…

Visitors to Ramsey over the past 10 years will probably have seen leaflets and posters about the proposed tidal turbine that was in the pipeline for Ramsey Sound. Its been a long time coming and suffered set backs along the way but it is finally installed and operational.

It is a test device to gauge how this technology can cope with very fast flowing currents such as those found in Ramsey Sound (speeds of up to 8 knots…

In some ways we are lucky that the latest named storm is coinciding with neap tides, i.e. the smallest tides of the month that occur around the half moon period. Nevertheless it was still quite lively in the harbour at high tide this lunchtime. We are safely tucked up in the farmhouse but the bedroom window makes a good viewing hide! Very relieved we decided the take the boat out of the water too! We are still well stocked…

A much quieter day weather wise and a few hundred guillemots were back on their breeding ledges for a few hours this morning, as is fairly customary on such November days. Most were in summer plumage whereas the majority of birds seen on seawatches at the moment are not indicating they are from further afield. Fulmars were on ledges today too.

Guillemots on ledges this morning - on calm winter days they often return…

Most years we lamb from our flock of Welsh Mountain ewes to increase the number of grazing animals during the summer months. This is to ensure we keep the grass down to a level that is beneficial to our important chough population who feed on soil invertebrates. When the grass is too long they can't feed effectively and the cooler, shaded soils mean less insects. The animals dung is important for dung beetles which as…

Since September we've had fleeting glimpses of a barn owl at dusk around the farm buildings. By day we've found evidence that the bird was roosting in the buildings at night in the form of droppings and pellets containing indigestible animal bones and fur (it was clear the bird had a liking for our voles!).  In fact looking at the bird log we had a few sightings back in August, followed by a long gap, but its possible…

The past five days have been very unsettled and as tides pick up again towards the new moon on Wedneday the swells are building too meaning any late seal pups will have a tough time of it. That said two new pups were born on Aber Felin today (the small beach under the house on the south side of the harbour) and are doing well as of this evening.

And what about pup 193, the long distance migrant from Skomer?! Well I checked…

Last Friday started off as a pretty normal seal monitoring day. As you might expect for late October numbers were beginning to drop off and following recent bad weather there have been some inevitable casualties as a result of pups getting separated from their mothers.

It was perhaps no major surprise then to find a marked pup from elsewhere lying on Hwrddod, one of our east coast beaches. I knew that Skomer use colour…

Each October we make a special trip out to our Grassholm reserve to cut free gannets that have become tangled in marine debris - for more information on the 2015 expedition see previous blogs here and here

This year we received the extremely generous donation of a GoPro camera by our Ramsey boat operator Thousand Islands Expeditions. This generosity is nothing new from the company that we have worked so closely with over…

We count pups on our 9 study beaches every 3 days and classify them into 5 stages from new born (class I) through to fully moulted (class V). At the end of the season this allows us to calculate how many have been born in total on these 9 beaches (which account for roughly 50% of all births on the island)

Today the number had dropped to 103 but new pups are still being born. They have been lucky so far this autumn in…

A journalist from Radio Wales, Sarah Moore, accompanied us to Grassholm yesterday and produced this article which was first broadcast today on Good Morning Wales. Click here to listen (skip to 02:26' to hear the piece - just after the bit about the man from Hull and his council tax issue!)

Yesterday we once again we made our annual October trip out to Grassholm to cut free juvenile and adult gannets that had become entangled in plastic debris. The bulk of this pollution is from the fishing industry and consists of fishing line and synthetic rope that ends up as waste in the sea. It is then brought ashore by gannets who mistake it for seaweed and build it into their nests. Over the course of the season some…

Last winter you might remember us blogging about a new arable plot experiment we were trying. It served three purposes (i) to enable us to grow winter feed for our sheep to eliminate the biosecurity risks of bringing food over from the mainland (i.e. rats and mice) (ii) to provide winter stubble for chough (they will feed on spilled seed during tough winters) and (iii) to provide additional habitat for foraging finches…

Early September is the peak Manx shearwater fledging period. Following rat eradication on Ramsey in 1999 our population of this nocturnal burrow nesting seabird has increased from 850 pairs to 3,800 (in 2012). We now carry out various research projects to study the ongoing positive effects of predator removal , one of which is the ringing of fledglings, something that would not have been possible when rats were here.

Next time you miss the boat to Ramsey you can always try swimming! It only takes 32 minutes!

Yesterday 5 members of the St Davids RNLI  crew took on the momentous challenge of swimming from Ramsey back to the RNLI station across the notorious Ramsey Sound. The tide flows at 8-10 knots in places and even at 'slack water' there are still rip currents flowing both ways. The crew set off from the shelter of our harbour but…

After a steady start the grey seal pupping season is starting to ramp up. This one was new born today and in total we have 40 pups on our 9 study beaches now (accounting for roughly half the total). By the end of December the total should be around the 650-700 mark!

Ramsey is the largest grey seal pupping site in south west Britain and September and October is the peak time for seeing them. Weather permitting we are…

Each spring and late summer we treat our sheep to prevent a particularly nasty condition called 'fly strike'. The green bottle fly (Lucilia sericata) lay their eggs in the wool of sheep and when the maggots hatch they have a ready food source available to them. Unfortunately for the sheep this means it will be slowly eaten alive. If not treated the injury caused by the maggots will kill the sheep hence the need…

Another unseasonably wet and windy day in Pembrokeshire; the perfect opportunity to crunch some numbers. Bird numbers of course!

So having spent most of the day surrounded by maps and notebooks full of bird records from this spring’s fieldwork we finally have the definitive numbers for 2015. These include all our breeding birds from dunnocks and wrens to peregrine and chough. We also made a start on the 5-yearly…

Prior to 2013 there were no records of house martins breeding on Ramsey when suddenly one lone pair started building a nest on the south side of the farmhouse. The nest kept falling down so we quickly put up an artificial box and they got two broods away that year. 

In 2014 the same, or possibly a different pair, returned and once again raised two broods. In August of last year we were treated to the sight of up to 60…

In Nov 2013 we installed the first of our Manx shearwater study nest boxes. These were inspired from a visit to New Zealand where we saw them in action with Fluttering and Hutton's shearwaters. The aim was to give ourselves a population we could easily work on for productivity and GPS tracking purposes, something not that easy to achieve on Ramsey as most of our expanding population (still recovering following rat eradication…

Visitors to Ramsey will probably have come across our flock of Welsh mountain sheep. They are part of our conservation grazing scheme primarily for the benefit of chough although many other species benefit from the grazed grassland such as wheatears.

Managing the sheep involves a good deal of animal husbandry and Lisa and I have been well trained over the years in this respect by Derek Rees, a local farmer who also brings…

Manx sheawaters are arguably the RSPB's biggest success story on Ramsey. When we took over the island in 1992 it was plagued with introduced brown rats, a disaster for any burrowing nesting seabird which has evolved over millions of years to nest underground on offshore islands free of such predators.

In 1999/2000 the RSPB together with Wildlife Management International from NZ manged to eradicate the rats and the…

It's that time of year again when we spend long periods with our eyes glued to telescopes counting thousands of seabirds. We can count most of them from the island but there are some 'blind spots' which we have to take to the water to deal with.

With most of the main land counts completed we took advantage of the current settled spell of weather and spent 4 hours on the water yesterday to finish the job.…

Its not unusual to see a few red kites on Ramsey during the year but today was exceptional! An amazing 51 were circling the island this morning putting on a fantastic show for our lucky visitors! The last time we saw anything like this was also in June, about 4 years ago (might be longer, the years roll into one sometimes!). Then it was an even more impressive 66 birds!

These sort of numbers are very unusual and probably…