Bats and Sea Shores

Last weekend I had my first outing with the West Yorkshire Bat Group. The task was to check bats boxes in Northcliffe Woods in Shipley. Well, I had a nice morning wandering round the woods, getting a break from work and studying and I even managed to drag Robert out with me. We met some nice people, but unfortunately the bat boxes were all empty so I didn't get the close encounter I had hoped for.

A couple of the boxes contained lovely nests, probably blue tit, but most of them just had a mixture of moths, millipedes and spiders.  I did manage to get a photo of a speckled wood butterfly flitting around the forest floor - another ID to add to my collection.

I've just watched an excellent programme on BBC1 called 'Britain's Big Wildlife Revival' as part of their Summer of Wildlife series. This week the focus was on marine and coastal wildlife, and it brought back lots of memories about my trip to South Africa, and made me reflect on all the things I have been fortunate enough to get involved in so far.

Puffins - I had limited success on my photo shoot to the East Coast earlier this month, and the programme confirmed that puffins are in decline in the north of the UK. The issues seem similar to those faced by the South African penguins, in that much of the problem is down to food availability. The programme showed nests being surveyed on the Farne Islands, and we got to see a chick just a few days old and it's parent being ringed.  And yes, naturalists aren't supposed to use the word 'cute' ... but sometimes you just have to! I'll never forget holding my first penguin chick ...

Sea Eagle - I had my first encounter with a sea engle when I took a group of air cadets
on an activity week to Mull. As we drove along the road, an adult was sitting on the fence post just metres away - what an amazing creature. In the programme, a 6 week old chick was removed from the nest to be weighed and ringed. Again, I can relate this to my penguin experiences. The sea eagle chick appeared much calmer than my penguin chicks though, and didn't peck its way out of the bag ... At 6kg, it was also somewhat heftier - it's a good job it was so complacent otherwise it would be a real handful.

Litter - A whole pile of weird stuff was washed up on Northumerland's beaches ... not as much as around Robben Island though. One thing I can confirm - ear buds and straws from drinks containers are a world wide problem. Please dispose of litter carefully, and don't flush weird things down the toilet.

Grey Seals - I did a project on seals as part of my A-level General Studies. I wrote to the BBC and got sent lots of amazing material from a documentary they had run; I think there was a disease like canine distemper affecting seals at that time. It's good to see the seal populations around Britain are recovering. It would be amazing to swim with the seals. When we went snorkelling and sea kayaking on the west coast of Scotland I was desparate for a close encounter, but they were always out of reach.

I've signed up for the CIEEM regional event at Flamborough in a few weeks time, so I'm now really enthused about going along and learning more about coastal species ID and recording.