Spring into action...

Jack here; having arrived back a couple of weeks ago I thought I would keep you all updated on what’s about on the reserve at the moment.

It’s finally beginning to feel a little bit like spring here today. It’s been a tough winter for many of our seabird species, birds such as Guillemots and Razorbills spend the entire winter out on the open sea. Imagine that... 7 months on the open sea! They arrive back in early spring to breed. Our Auks (Guillemots, Razorbills and one or two Puffins) will come and go at this time of year, checking out old nest sites and enjoying the novelty of being on dry land.

The affect of unseasonal weather has meant that many of our seabirds have been slow getting started. Guillemots and Razorbills have just about become a permanent feature on our cliffs and Shags have begun building some impressive nests. The cliffs are a noisy place, with bird’s pair bonding and disputing territories. Keep a look out for the first eggs. Last year the first Guillemots were seen on eggs on the 14th April.

During the spring many migrant birds pass through the reserve on their journey north to breeding grounds. St. Abb’s Head provides the perfect stop-off point as it is a prominent headland. This year many of our migrant birds have been later than usual due to the strong north east wind (who wants to fly into that). In the last week we have been graced by Chiffchaff, Wheatear and White Wagtail and this morning provided the first records of Blackcap, Willow Warbler and Swallow.

A few signs of spring on the reserve...

Frogspawn

Peacock Butterfly (first of the year)

 

Mute swan courtship display

Hare (keep an eye out for boxing)

Walking the bounds

If you have ever looked at an ordnance survey map of the Berwickshire coast you might have spotted that the National Trust for Scotland actually owns more than St Abb's Head. We also own a stretch of coastal slope to the south of Fast Castle and an area of farmland adjacent to the Rangers' Office. I will explain about the farmland in a later post, but today we went to check the boundary fence of the Lumsdaine strip, as we call it, the length of coastal grassland which runs from Dowlaw Dean near Fast Casle to Westerside Dean near Coldingham Loch. The steep sloping grassland might not be an attractive proposition for farming, but supports nationally and internationally important maritime flora and breeding seabirds not to mention being a spectacular landscape (picture left, Lumsdaine Shore).

It is a fanatsic length of coastline, liberally scattered with hillforts and other archaeological remains, and somewhere where you can really get the feeling of being a million miles from anywhere even though you're not. The Berwickshire Coast Path runs the whole length between St Abb's Head and Fast Castle so it is well signed, why not check it out sometime? Here's a picture (right) of Georgia, Laura and Ernie, a long term volunteer of ours, having elevensies at the hill fort at Tun Law.

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Nothing to see here?

It always feels a little odd come the beginning of August when all the seabirds have left the cliffs and headed back out to sea where they spend most of the year. And you could be forgiven for thinking that without the clamour of the seabirds, that St Abb's Head is not worth visiting because there's nothing to see. But that's just so not the case, even if to take the spectacular scenery out of the equation, the property has something to offer whatever the time of year and whatever the weather.

Take yesterday for example. Definitely an autumnal feel in the air, and a strong breeze troubling the steely grey sea. Not a day for birdwatching you might think, but actually one of the regular local birdwatchers had a very fruitful seawatching session yesterday recording sooty and Manx shearwaters (the latter pictured above); great,arctic and pomarine skuas; a red throated diver and a little gull to name but a few.

And, I was leaning on the gate by the office texting earlier (we get very little reception actually in the office!) and a stoat virtually ran over my foot - I'm not sure who was the most surprised! And then when I was doing the rounds this afternoon, the sea had calmed down and it was a perfect day for spotting cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises). So I was keeping my eyes on the sea, looking out for any congregations of feeding birds, or disturbances on the surface and I was lucky enough to spot at least 3 harbour porpoise quite a way out to the NW of the Head feeding in amongst a group of diving gannets. Fabulous!

Catching Up

Sorry I haven't posted a blog for a while, but I was away on leave for about 10 days and then I have been catching up with the resultant backlog since I got back. So what have I been up to?

We will gloss over the mundane but never the less time consuming task of dealing with the literally hundreds of e-mails in my inbox, and concentrate on the more interesting stuff. First thing I did was to get straight back in to thistle thwacking (a seemingly never ending task at this time of year, but luckily very satifying!) and ragwort pulling with our volunteers Dave and John. We do not have too much ragwort on the property, but as it is injurous to livestock both in its green and dried form, and we use sheep to help manage our wild-flower rich grasslands, we must make sure that we keep what ragwort we have got under control. We use the age old technique of pulling it out by the root which is very effective and also more environmentally friendly than using chemicals.

Then we had a visit from the Trust's Mountains for People Project Officer, Bob Brown, who is our in house expert on upland footpath maintenance. Now, I know we are not in the uplands, but believe it or not, montane and maritime enviroments have a lot of things in common. Both are exposed to extreme weather conditions which has an effect how vulnerable the vegetation is to damage and so how easliy the paths get eroded. With nealry 50, 000 visitors a year, our paths are beginning to become quite eroded in places and need some attention. So the idea is, Bob and his team of upland footpath workers will come down from the mountains this autumn/ winter and spend a while in the relatively balmy conditions at St Abbs using their expertise to make our footpaths more pleasing to the eye, more confortable to walk on and also protecting our grasslands from damage.

What else? Well today I need to make comments on a consultation concerning the siting of offshore windfarms off the Berwickshire and Lothian coasts, and then maybe out for a bit more strimming of footpaths.

So I suppose I'd better get on with it then, bye for now, Liza (have you worked out colour coding yet?).

Unsynchronised shags

First thing's first; I'm cheating slightly here. This is a photo from the Farne Islands and not from St. Abb's Head. My camera is not good enough for seabirds here but at the Farnes you can get much closer and this is the result!

Anyway, as well as counting the shags (we have 157 nests this year compared with 138 last year and 131 in 2008) we also calculate their productivity. This is a measurement of their breeding success. I do this survey every 7-10 days and in each nest I'm looking to see how many eggs or chicks there are and how close they are to fledging. Most of the species that breed here are very synchronised: individuals lay, hatch and fledge at roughly the same time. Shags, on the other hand, are incredibly spread out. The first chicks fledged on 2nd July but today I saw some chicks that must have hatched within the last few days and there are even some birds that appear to be incubating!

Laura

Berwick High School lends a hand

Today we had a group of nine students from Berwick High School here to carry out some work towards their John Muir Awards. In the morning they went out with Liza to learn all about how and why we carry out seabird productivity surveys. They used binoculars and telescopes to map out the kittiwake nests on a section of cliff and then recorded the number of chicks present.

In the afternoon we did some thistle bashing! There are a few types of thistle that grow on St. Abb's Head but creeping thistles (see photo) cause problems if we let them grow unchecked. They grow very aggressively and can take over large areas of grassland, outcompeting other plants. The students from Berwick High School helped us to clear a large area of thistles helping to keep St. Abb's Head in tip top condition.

Thanks guys!

Laura

Having terrible trouble with the wind

I've just had to abort my kittiwake productivity monitoring because I was having great trouble with a force 5 wind trying to blow me and my equipment off the cliff. Plus the fact that I couldn't hold the binoculars or the telescope steady enough to see the birds clearly. This particular part of the seabird monitoring we do is to monitor the breeding success of our kittiwakes, pretty important stuff as these are the birds that have declined most markedly over the last decade or so. I will have to hope for a better forecast for the weekend and I can have another try.