More stormies

A call from Colin yesterday afternoon suggested that the weather may be suitable for some more Storm Petrel ringing. If it went ahead Stan had already agreed to go with Colin and as Andy was looking at possibly going out as I well I said I would team up with Andy.

I contacted Andy to get the details as he was looking at trying a new location on the East side of South Ronaldsay. With time and location sorted it was just a question of seeing what the weather was going to do.

A late text from Andy confirmed that it was a green light for ringing but he changed the location to our usual spot on South Ronaldsay.

I met up with Andy at 23:30 and we set the net up and got his new sound system running. We didn't have to wait long, approx 10 minutes, before the first bird was in the net. Quickly followed by the second and third. In under an hour we had caught five new birds. Things were looking good and over the next three hours we caught a further 20 birds giving us a total of 23 new birds and two retrap.

At one point there were  number of Storm Petrels flying around directly above us.

Hopefully we will try a few more sessions between now and mid-September but it won't be until probably the middle of next week as we have heavy rain and strong winds forecast through the weekend and into Tuesday.