OK so it’s been ages since my last blog…sorry John, but so much has been happening since May!
In June I went with a team from WWT to Iceland to work on a project being run by Danish and Icelandic researchers that is looking at where Common Scoters are overwintering. Last year the team fitted 13 loggers to females Scoters caught during the breeding season in a marsh in north-east Iceland, near to Husavik. The plan was to re-locate and re-capture the birds and retrieve and replace the loggers. Sounds simple? Well we spent a lot of time walking in a line, across various sections of marsh trying to either flush the birds from the nests or to spot nests that had been left, while the birds were on recess. We managed to locate over 40 Common Scoter nests. Once we had located the nests we then had to catch the birds. I’d never done anything like it before but it basically involved sneaking up to the bird on the nest, surrounding it with a very long mist net and then flushing them into it. Sound simple? Well, it took us a while to get the hang of it but we eventually managed to catch more than 20 birds, 8 of which had loggers on from the previous year. The data from the loggers showed that the birds had been overwintering in various locations from Scotland to Portugal and that they had remained in the same location throughout the winter. The data gathered is incredibility interesting as so little is currently known about the relationship between overwintering and breeding locations.
It was a great experience and Iceland is an amazing place, I got to see some great birds…even though I’m not strictly speaking a bird person, even I was impressed by geofalcons, artic skewers, harlequin ducks (males in their breeding plumage!), red necked phalaropes, and massive numbers of ducks, divers and waders…Apart from all the bird stuff I did also get to do some invert sampling and even got a trip over to Lake Myvatn to spend time with Icelandic researchers who are looking at invert and stickleback populations there, which was fab!
OK so that was Iceland in a very small nutshell…
In July I was back up in Scotland for about 3 weeks to work with the RSPB team who’ve been collecting the invert samples for the Scoter project. I spent time around Forsinard and Drumnadrochit, Scoter watching and invert sampling. Whilst in Drum I stayed with Gwen, the upland invert apprentice, which was great, thanks Gwen! It was good to meet another person as mad about the small things as I am and to spend a few days out looking at terrestrial inverts! We then travelled down to Stirling to meet up with the BTCV crew and to head over to Ayr for the Bioblitz…other people have already talked about the bioblitz in their blogs so I won’t go on about it, it was a great few days though so thanks everyone!
That was July in Scotland in an even smaller nutshell…
I got back down to Gloucester at the beginning of August and have been in the lab with my samples since then…I’m now starting to receive the 2010 samples on top of last years…which is a bit daunting, but exciting too!
That’s me for now, I will try and remember to blog again soon, ttfn!
Hannah