My Orkney Summer

Apologies for not posting anything for the past few months, I’ve been unbeliveably busy with work over the summer! I’ll try and cover everything that’s been happening up here without rambling on for too long…

So work wise, I’ve been very busy indeed! Over the past few months I’ve been surveying all of the wildlife that can be found on the reserve, with a focus on the seabirds. Twice a week I have been monitoring the Guillemots, Razorbills, Shags and Kittiwakes nesting on the cliff faces along the area of the reserve known as Fowl Craig, as well as going over to Westray at least once a week to monitor the seabirds nesting on the RSPB’s Noup Cliffs reserve. However, there are too many seabirds at each of these reserves for me to monitor them all, so thankfully I only have to do a selection of sites. This monitoring involves regularly visiting each site and recording what every nesting pair of birds is doing – whether they have eggs, chicks or nothing at all. Each site may have a few hundred birds, so it can take some time! The point of this monitoring is to see how many chicks each species manages to rear to fledging (flying), as the chicks are much less vulnerable to predation when they can fly away from the nest, so it gives us an idea of how well the breeding season has gone, and since these species will return to the same nest each year to breed, we can follow each pair throughout their lifetime and track any changes in breeding success. This monitoring is important as seabirds are at the top of the foodchain and they exclusively eat fish and other marine life such as squid, so by following the fate of these seabirds, we can see how healthy our marine environment is - the more seabirds there are, the healthier our seas must be, as they can support a larger number of predators.

Me surveying the seabirds at Noup Cliffs on Westray

However, over the past decade, our seabirds have been rapidly declining, especially in the northern isles (Orkney and Shetland). A lot of research has been carried out to find out why our seabirds are declining, and climate change has been found to be the answer. Climate change is causing our seas to heat up and is pushing Sandeels (the preferred fish of seabirds) further away and into deeper waters, making them harder to get at. Due to this lack of food, the majority of our seabirds have been showing a rapid decline in numbers, as they are unable to find enough food to feed their chicks. Last year none of the Guillemots and Razorbills nesting on the cliffs on Papa Westray managed to fledge chicks, but this year we are seeing a different picture. My monitoring has revealed that we have had at least 26 Guillemot chicks and 5 Razorbill chicks fledge, an amazing result! Let’s hope they can keep it up for a few more years!

Puffins!!

In addition to my seabird monitoring, I have also been carrying out Corncrake surveys. Corncrakes are small, unassuming birds related to Moorhens, although they don’t really spend any time in the water. But there is more to them than meets the eye! Every year they migrate from Africa to breed in Europe, Orkney and the Western Isles. And as soon as they arrive here, the males start calling. Their distinctive ‘crex-crex’ call can be heard all night, every night, coming from areas of suitable habitat such as iris beds, nettles and silage fields. This makes Orkney the perfect destination for these birds, as the main crop here is silage (which is used to feed livestock over the winter, the main export being beef). Their calls are incredibly loud and the males will call all night without stopping so that they can attract in as many females as possible. So naturally, the best time to survey them is at night! So, between midnight and 3am I carried out surveys for these birds, visiting every area of suitable habitat. Luckily, this only needs to be done twice at each location, so I did two surveys across Papa Westray (unfortunately we only have 1 Corncrake this year), and one on Westray, which has the most Corncrakes in Orkney this year, a massive 12 calling males!

In addition to these surveys, I have also been following the fates of the Arctic Skuas, Great Skuas, Fulmars, Gannets, Arctic Terns, Sandwich Terns and the various wader species that have been nesting on the two reserves. I have also been doing guided walks around the North Hill reserve twice a week, showing visitors all of the wildlife on the reserve, from Puffins to Primroses and shipwrecks to seals. Currently I am busy counting the Scottish Primroses that grow on the North Hill reserve on Papa Westray. There are about 50 colonies across the reserve, each holding anything from 1 to 8000 Scottish Primroses. I managed to get a group of volunteers and staff to come down for a visit to count the largest colony of 8,134 plants and I am slowly getting through the rest of them, although it takes a long time, crawling along on hands and knees to look for these tiny but beautiful plants!

A Scottish Primrose (Primula scotica)

A very cute Arctic Skua chick!

Please click on the following links to read my posts on the Orkney RSPB blog:

• Primroses
• Gannets
• Arctic Terns
• Westray Regatta (written by our Corncrake Officer)

Despite carrying out such a variety of work, I am still able to have something closely resembling a social life! I get to the coffee morning as often as I can so that I can catch up with some of the locals that I wouldn’t see very often otherwise, and I go to the film nights and Saturday pub nights as often as I can to socialise with the islanders and any visitors that are staying on the island. I also get down to Kirkwall to see the other RSPB staff and have a look around the shops a couple of times a month. I had a visit from my dad in mid-June, and he seemed to enjoy his trip to my little island quite a lot! We visited all of the historical sites and he came on one of my guided tours across the reserve, but seemed to be nervous of how close I was getting to the edge of the cliffs! But at least he got to see lots of seals and seabirds, and got a short introduction to the island in general. Hopefully his visit has made him want to visit Orkney again – it really is a beautifal part of Scotland.

In action - the bike basket that my dad sent me!

My awesome Papa Westray socks! Thanks dad!

In mid-July we had the 7^th annual Papay Fun Weekend! This is basically an entire weekend of fun and frolics, including BBQs, arts and crafts, tattie and spoon races, obstacle courses, tug-of-war, tea and cakes, carty races ‘doon the brae’, Scottish pipe bands, and two ceilidh dances! I was in charge of face painting and hook-a-duck for the weekend, both of which proved to be very popular, and I now know several of the Papay versions of the traditional Highland dances! I managed to get to the Westray Regatta, a sailing race between yachts of various sizes from Westray to Papay and back again on the last weekend in July. I went over and set up an RSPB stall, sat out in the sunshine, talked to passer’s by, and got to watch the boats sailing around! I also saw another pipe band playing, and ate some more cake…I really should stop eating so much cake! I’ve even manged to squeeze in a bit of bird ringing in my spare time, but unfortunately I’ve not managed to get to any of the other islands yet. However, I am planning a trip to North Ronaldsay at the beginning of September after my contract here ends, so I’ll let you know how it goes! Next weekend is the County Show down in Kirkwall, which should be entertaining!

The carty that won the prize for being the best looking!

Me ringing a Hen Harrier chick!

It really is a very beautiful island and such a lovely place to live, I’m so glad I’ve had the opportunity to spend such a long time here! I’m hoping to come back again next year, but it hasn’t been decided yet – watch this space!

Happy on Papay!

So here I am, living and working on one of the smallest islands in Orkney - Papa Westray, known affectionately by the locals as 'Papay', and I'm loving it! Sure, I'm here on my own, living in a small, rather draughty little cottage (Rose Cottage - it's pink!), far away from all of the people I know, but it's a lovely place to be and I'm just enjoying being here!

Rose Cottage - my home until August

I'm the only RSPB staff living on the island, and I work to look after the RSPB reserve here called North Hill. It's a rather large area of land (25% of the entire island!) and is made up of a variety of habitats: squelching bogs, sheer cliff faces, boulder beaches, small pools, and the rarest of all - maritime heathland. This is a habitat seriously in decline, with Papa Westray holding one of the largest areas of maritime heathland in Europe - and it's not exactly a big island! This is the habitat that SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage - the Scottish equivalent of DEFRA) are working to maintain. This habitat is important not just because of it's rarity, but also because it is home to a wide range of species. In the summer the heathland comes to life as a carpet of wildflowers. In addition to this, many bird species like to nest in this habitat, including Skuas, Terns and a variety of waders, all of which I am required to survey and monitor in my new job as Warden here. In addition to my bird monitoring work, I also give guided tours of the reserve twice a week, maintain the bird hide and do counts of the diminutive Scottish Primrose. Only found in Caithness, Sutherland and 6 of the Orkney isles, the Scottish Primrose is one of our rarest endemic plants, and I have the task this year of surveying the whole of the North Hill reserve for these easily-overlooked little flowers. I am also responsible for looking after the RSPB reserve on Westray, our neighbouring island, called Noup Cliffs - home to 600 pairs of breeding Gannets, as well as thousands of other breeding seabirds. Since arriving here, I have been constantly busy with preparation for the coming season, survey work and guided walks, as well as with 'Bag the Bruck', an Orkney-wide event that involves removing rubbish (bruck) from the coastline. This took me days and days to complete and involved removing a variety of bruck, mostly empty drinks bottles but also rusty barbed wire, rope, cans, shoes, buoys and even an onion...

The Scottish Primose - Primula scotica

The results of 'Bag the Bruck' - there would have been 5 more of the large buoys, but they kept disappearing...

The biggest part of my job here is to survey the breeding seabirds, so that we can monitor the population and see how they are faring, which, unfortunately is not too well. Almost all seabirds are declining in the Northern Isles, due mostly to the lack of their favourite food: Sandeels. Most seabird species (Terns, Kittiwakes, Guillemots, Razorbills, Shags etc) like to eat Sandeels, and these small fish will form a large part of the diet of these birds. The only problem with that is there are few Sandeels left here, partly due to global warming and partly due to overfishing. Because of this, the seabirds have to eat a wider variety of fish, or travel further to catch fish. This is thought to be why the Gannets on Noup Cliffs are doing so well - they travel far and wide and will eat a variety of fish. However, most of the seabirds here just bring in less food, which causes another problem - Great Skuas. The Skua's feed by mobbing the other birds and stealing their food, but since the other birds aren't bringing in as much food, the Skuas are turning to another source - the eggs and chicks of the other seabirds. But the Skuas are protected - the UK holds about 60% of the population of Great Skuas so we would like to save them too, but it's difficult. What we need is more Sandeels! Or at least less global warming!

Black Guillemots (Tysties) sitting next to me on a survey of them!

But enough of the depressing stuff, I was writing about how much I'm enjoying it here! All of the birds here have Orkney names: Great Skua = Bonxie, Arctic Skua = Skooty Alan, Arctic Tern = Pickie, Sandwich Tern = Big Pickie, Black Guillemot = Tystie, Eider = Dunter etc. So if I cross over between names, you know what I mean! The people here are all lovely too, very friendly and welcoming! There's a real sense of community here, everyone helps out everyone else, and there are events throughout the week and all through the year to keep everyone together. Each week there are 2 main events: Wednesday mornings are coffee mornings (people here make amazing cakes!), and Saturday night is pub night, when they open up the pub cupboard! There's no dedicated cafes or pubs here, so it's good that they have these events each week. They also show a film every other Saturday, and in the summer there are regattas and even the Papay Fun Weekend, so I'm looking forward to a good season, filled with cake and alcohol!! 


As well as the birds, the people and the cake, people come to visit Papay for it's beautiful coastlines, sandy white beaches, and historical importance. It may seem like a tiny island, but Papa Westray has been inhabited for many thousands of years, and there are remains to prove it. The Knap of Howar is the oldest house in Europe and thought to be older than the pyramids! Then there's St Boniface Kirk, an old church which stands on top of an even older church, proving that Papa Westray was in important Christian site - used as a base from which to convert the 'heathens' in Shetland, Orkney and the far north of Scotland. There is also St Tredwell's Chapel, which stands on the site of an old broch and is named after a girl who plucked out her own eyes in order to preserve her chastity...crazy bitch. Plus, those visiting Papa Westray by plane will get to go on the shortest flight in the world - remember to ask for your certificate and bottle of whiskey (it's only a taster bottle)! So if you're ever up in Orkney, I would definitely recommend a visit to Papa Westray, hopefully you'll like it here as much as I do! Wish me luck for the season, and send some good weather my way!

The Knap of Howar

St Boniface Kirk

The remains of St Tredwell's Chapel

'Watch yae heed!' - low flying planes!

A New Opportunity!

Good news! I have a new job!! As of next Tuesday (10th April) I will be working on Orkney for the RSPB!


I travelled all the way up to Orkney for the interview, which I hoped went well at the time, then a few hours later when I was on the ferry back to mainland Scotland I got a phone call asking if I wanted the job! And of course, I said yes! So, as of next Tuesday I will be working for the RSPB as the Warden on Papa Westray, a smaller island off of mainland Orkney (see map below). I will be responsible for monitoring the progress of the seabirds breeding in two different colonies, on two different islands! One at Noup Cliffs reserve on the island of Westray, and the other at North Hill on Papa Westray, where I will also be living! I will be leading guided tours around these reserves as well as surveying the other wildlife present and protecting the rare and declining Maritime Heath habitat, and species such as the Corncrake. It sounds like a brilliant job and I'm told that the people on the island are all very friendly and welcoming, so hopefully it will all go very well! Now I just have to sort everything out for moving up there! It's going to be colder than a summer in the south, that's for sure, but at least I'll be closer to Jason! I'll still be two ferry journeys away, but that's a lot closer than I am now!

Currently I'm still living on Holy Island, on my own as Jason has gone back up to Fair Isle to work there for his second season. However, I am now living in the staff flat instead of the cottage, as the tourist season here has begun and there are now some working holiday volunteers living in the cottage and volunteering up at the Castle during the day. It's a nice little flat though, so I don't mind moving. I'll be sad to leave this island as I've really enjoyed it here and the people are all really lovely, but I'm really glad that I managed to find something paid for this coming season! I'm sure that I'll come back to Holy Island to visit people, and I hope that they have enjoyed having me and Jason here as much as we enjoyed being here! A really lovely place, especially when it's sunny! I feel that it's a good thing that we didn't discover how good the Pilgrim's Cafe (next door) is until recently though, or we would both be leaving with no money! Such a lovely little place. If you ever do visit Holy Island, make sure you stop in for a cuppa!


I feel like it's all going to be quite hectic from now until I get settled in to my new cottage on Orkney, but I will try and find the time to update again with some photos when I get there, and keep you all informed! And if your stuck for a place to go on holiday this year, come for a visit! Wish me luck with my new job and my new home in a new place!

A Rich Man's Career

Hello all, sorry that I haven’t updated this blog in over a month; I’ve been mega busy with sending in job applications and even going to the occasional interview! Not that it’s helped, as I still don’t have a job lined up for the summer, and it’s getting a bit late in the season now for any new jobs to be advertised as most jobs start at the end of March or beginning of April, but I’m still vaguely hopeful that something will come along and save the day! The problem is, every time I go to an interview, there’s somebody there with more experience than me, and they end up getting the job. But it’s just so hard to get more practical experience unless you can afford to volunteer for 6-12 months or buy all of the training that you need. Sometimes I wish that conservation wasn’t a rich man’s career, but there’s not much that I can do to change that! I have 2 options if I don’t manage to get anything paid:

1. I get a random job (e.g. go back to work at Hemel hospital) and volunteer on the weekends, which would get me a bit of experience as well as some money. However, I probably won’t get enough experience to make a difference for my job prospects and the work is unreliable, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to get a job in a different sector.

2. I save up as much money as I can in this last month working for the National Trust on Holy Island, and use that money to do some residential volunteering on one of the RSPB nature reserves. I’ll gain loads of great experience but I’ll have to sign on so that I have enough money to buy food, and I’ll still have to find a job when that finishes.

What do I do?? Any opinions anyone? I’d love to hear other people’s view on this, so contact me if you have any advice, or if you want to offer me a job!!

Anyway, moving on... For those of you that don’t know, Jason is currently in Israel! He’s gone over there with the guys that he works with on Fair Isle to catch and ring loads of birds so that they can all get their ‘C’ permits, which means that Jason will be able to ring birds unsupervised (as long as he’s ringed that species before under the supervision of someone with a higher level of permit). At the moment we both have ‘Restricted C’ permits, which allow us to ring seabirds and their young unsupervised, but we are both working towards gaining a full ‘C’. Let’s hope that wherever I end up, I’ll be able to do some bird ringing! Jason should be back from his trip soon, so I’ll let you all know how it went, although I imagine it will have been pretty amazing!

Meanwhile, I’m stuck on Holy Island! I could easily walk across the causeway (at low tide of course), but where do I go from there? Berwick-Upon-Tweed is our closest town but that’s about 8 miles from the end of the causeway. So, I’m stuck. But I don’t really mind, it gives me a chance to explore the island on my own for a bit and see lots of pretty little birds. Although, I actually did get off the island earlier this week for an interview up in Inverness, and managed to see all of the people that I’d been missing, which was really lovely. Now just need to come back to Hertfordshire and see everyone there that I’m missing! Looks like I’m going to be coming back at the end of this job anyway, so I’ll see you all then!

We might be volunteering up at the Castle soon, as they need some more volunteers to help them out. We’ve been to visit a few places in the nearby area as well. We went to Chain Bridge Honey Farm, which is just up the road and makes some really tasty honey, so we ended up buying quite a lot! We’ve also been to visit the Barn at Beal, which is just at the end of the causeway and hosts a lovely selection of birds of prey. It wasn’t properly open when we visited, but they still let us come in, showed us all of the lovely birds that they have there, and even let us hold a couple of owls! They should be properly open now, with falconry displays and everything, so we’ll probably pop back in again soon. I was thinking of asking them if they need any more volunteers as well! We’ve been down to Alnwick a couple of times now and even visited Wallington, another National Trust property, which was a good day out. We didn’t go into the house, just looked around the grounds, but saw some lovely birds and enjoyed it all the same. I’ve been making a few cakes (thanks to Becky!), and been doing lots of reading as well, thanks for the book Nana, I finished it last week and really enjoyed it! Hope you and Grandpa are well; hopefully I’ll get the chance to come and visit you guys soon!

Other than that, there’s not a lot going on to be honest! Going for wanders, looking at lovely birds, applying for jobs, that’s my life at the moment! I've managed to add a few photos, those of you on Facebook may have already seen them, but I hope you'll enjoy them anyway! I will update again soon, hopefully with the news that I’ve got a job. Wish me luck!

Lindisfarne Castle

Looking at the village from the Castle

A view towards the mainland

Our cottage for the winter

The ruins of the Priory, built by Monks, destroyed by Vikings

Priory

St Aiden, who owned the island and used it as a base to convert the Northumbrians

Warning signs on the causeway

Our living room, really cosy, especially when the fire's going!

Our kitchen

It's amazing that anyone actually gets stuck, considering how many signs there are along the causeway

The rescue hut, for those that do get caught out when crossing the causeway

A frosty morning

Little stream

Some more ruins on the island

Looking towards the mainland on a still day

Looking back at the Castle across the harbour

The Castle, in all its glory

The Lime kilns next to the Castle

Looking back at the village and Castle from the top of the sand dunes

One of the sandy beaches

Waves in the sand

Fun times on the beach!

A young Shag at the bottom of the Castle, he got trapped inside all night!

My new binoculars! Thanks to everyone that gave me money to buy them.

The Journey to Holy Island...

After my job in Inverness had finished, I returned to Hemel to look for winter work as I was unable to find any in Scotland. However, I was unable to find anything in Hemel, and mostly spent my time volunteering for my local conservation group and visiting Jason in Norfolk, thinking that I’d be unemployed all winter. So imagine my surprise when Jason and I received an email from our boss from the Farne Islands asking if we would be interested in living and working on Lindisfarne over the winter! The National Trust owns Lindisfarne castle and some of the surrounding land, and keep the castle open during the winter, and they needed someone to live on the island and take the emergency phone in the evenings after the staff had left, and make sure that the castle doesn’t burn down! It’s a pretty simple job, with free accommodation, and with few prospects of a job elsewhere, me and Jason agreed to do it! A month or so later and all was sorted, we were moving up to Lindisfarne on the 8^th January to live in the National Trust’s holiday cottage and look after the castle in the evenings until 25^th March! All went well with the move up here, although it was a very long drive from home (thankfully, Jason has a car. It would have been even worse on the train)!

This is now our second week of living up here and the job is going very well so far! It really is simple. We get all day off to do whatever we want, which mostly involves exploring the island and looking for birds, and when the staff at the castle go home for the day we take the emergency phone. If it rings, we answer it and go up to the castle to see what’s wrong. We check the fire alarms, make sure there isn’t a fire, reset the alarms, lock up and go home again. Obviously, if there is a fire we call emergency services etc., but we have been reassured that there will almost certainly be no problem with the alarm system, and hopefully no fires, so it’s really just a precautionary measure, and we get our weekends off! As it’s only part-time, the pay isn’t brilliant, but as we get a rent-and-bill-free cottage to live in, so all we really have to buy is food, so the pay is not an issue really! And the cottage is really nice! It’s fairly old, so the floors are uneven in places and the doorframes are a bit short so Jason has to watch his head sometimes, but I like it, it’s quirky! And it's furnished nicely, with a little wood-burning fire so it’s really cosy! No broadband here, so we’re using a dongle which doesn’t get a lot of signal, and not a lot of mobile phone signal either, but it hasn’t been too much of an issue so far!

Lindisfarne, or Holy Island as it’s also known (due to the monks that lived here many hundreds of years ago), is a small island off the north Northumberland coast, very close to the Scottish border and the Farne Islands, which we can see from here on a clear day. Access to the island is via a tidal causeway, which means it is readily accessible by car 12 hours a day, but cut off from the mainland for the other 12. This means that we do have to be quite careful and check the safe crossing times before we try to cross the causeway; get it wrong and your car gets drowned in salt water, and you have to await rescue by the coastguard!! Apparently it does happen a few times each year, just look at these news stories, so we need to watch out for that! Also, we have to make sure that we’re back on the island in good time, or we could be stuck on the mainland all night! The causeway also means that our working hours change each day. None of the castle staff live on the island, so they come on to the island in the morning, work all day at the castle, and then leave before the causeway closes. As soon as they leave our job begins, so depending on the tides we may have to have the phone from 2pm onwards or from 8pm onwards. While we have the phone we can’t leave the island, as we need to be nearby if something does go wrong.

It really is a very nice island with areas of saltmarsh, sand dunes, ponds and fields, with the small village on the south-east side of the island, closest to the causeway and the mainland. Only about 150 people live here, with a small shop, post-office and a couple of pubs on the island, which remain closed most of the time during the winter, except for half-term week when they should be open for business. It’s pretty quiet here, but it gives us time to explore the island and look for interesting birds! A few days ago, Jason spotted a Green-winged Teal (a type of duck) on one of the ponds, which is a North American version of the Eurasian Teal that we get in the UK, as well as seeing some nice geese and a couple of Mute Swans with coloured rings on their legs (for identifying them). We have a couple of bird feeders up in our little garden, which have mostly been attracting House Sparrows, Blackbirds and Starlings, but just today we had a lovely little Tree Sparrow, which aren’t seen here too often, and several Greenfinches, which are really pretty! We are keeping our eyes open for more interesting birds, and will keep you posted on what we see, and our adventures whilst we're here! I am also applying for summer jobs while I’m up here, and will keep you updated on my progress, hopefully I’ll get something good again this year – wish me luck and watch out for my next post, which should include some photos!