Saturday, May 2, 2009

1st May,2009.

Two days essentially spent on various arrangements relating to BTO surveys, particularly the Atlas. Realistically it's not worthwhile starting serious work here before the end of April/begining of May as most of the summer visitors haven't arrived to breed ( still haven't in "volume" or in many cases as yet! ). Completing surveys in early May and late June/early July tends to pick up good confirmatory evidence of resident breeding species so, all in all, the system works well. Our only problem is a lack of participants! However, a couple of groups are visiting on holiday and days have been agreed in outline with the "Islay stalwarts" so that a group of us can "migrate" to Jura for the day!

The night of the 30th April/1st May,2009 was a bit wild with strong easterlies and rain, in fact quite a substantial amount of rain!! My Actinic lamp (moth trap) was blown over despite being in a supposedley sheltered position! Thankfully, everything fell on grass so no damage was done. A couple of "moth-ers" are visting Islay soon and such will help generate records for what is essentially an under-worked area. You can imagine, if we're short on resident birdwatchers, moth-ers are a rather rare commodity!!!

Some spells spent seawatching produced very little despite a promising SW wind. A depression tracking in next week might produce better conditions and some skua records!!

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