5 September 2016

18 Jun16 – Seabirds on Swona



Today saw one of our annual seabird ringing trips to Swona and my first ringing session of the year.

The team consisted of Colin, Brian, Stan, Alison and me and the aim was to retrieve and deploy geolocators as well as ringing.

We were able to retrieve five geolocators from Razorbills who along with another 10 adults were fitted with new geolocators. The aim is to fit the geolocators and retrieve them a year later however the retrieved geolocators on this trip all came from birds that had them fitted two years ago so it will be interesting to see if the data can be retrieved and what it shows us.

In terms of ringing, we ringed Great Black-backed Gull - three chicks, Razorbill - three adults and 15 chicks plus an additional 12 retraps, Puffin – three adults and Shag two adults and 14 chicks. The Shags were also colour ringed.

Eight pairs of Great Skuas (Bonxies) were seen but there was no sign of any breeding terns this year.

We will hopefully pay another visit to Swona later in the summer to do the annual ringing of Fulmar chicks.

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