Sunday 27 July 2008

26 & 27 July - Saturday/Sunday

Well, how do you follow a day like Friday?

We steamed back up onto the Jones Bank in mirror-calm conditions, and saw a couple of great shearwaters. One of these was flew past without flapping its wings once, even though there wasn't a breath of wind for it to catch. How do they do that? The second was sitting on the sea (it obviously couldn't do "that") and it looked odd - we hazarded any number of guesses as to what it was before it was close enough to see properly. The third flew past while we were having a "scientific team" photo taken. I think we ruined the last shot as all the birders were suddenly looking and pointing out to sea. Once a birder, always a birder. Anyway, here's the group shot below.


After the group photo, we took the recording equipment to the box for the last time, and did a brief spell of observation. We suddenly picked out a pod of killer whales, far enough ahead of the ship for Mark to race up to the bridge to phone down to the main laboratory and let everyone else know. As he put the phone down, Clare had already scaled three sets of steps and run the length of the ship to get to the front viewing positions. She has never seen orcas after all her years of cetacean watching, so this was a truly special moment for her, especially as a bull orca showed itself well to the appreciative gallery. That's how you follow a day like Friday!

Young male orca (per Matt)

We had to disassemble the bird boxes and pack away all our other kit as Sunday would be a very busy day.

Some of us managed to go onto deck first thing on the Sunday morning. I saw a Cory's shearwater first thing, just south of Lizard Point. There were a few Manx shearwaters and storm-petrels about, but no basking sharks or Balearic shearwaters to see. But it was a cracking morning, and a gannet flew past the bows, touching distance away, and glided gently toward Falmouth harbour. Perhaps it was trying to guide us home. Probably not! As I write this, the pilot is on board and we're about to throw the ropes ashore and all our bags and equipment, possibly not in that order. We will fly home to Aberdeen this evening and back to our normal lives that await us.

It has been a fantastic cruise. An interesting start, a fairly tedious middle and a tremendously exciting ending.

Dawn light on the bridge of RSS James Cook


A few gratuitous sunset photos

Signing off. Over and out

Friday 25 July 2008

25 July - Friday

Since my last installment, we steamed away from the Isles of Scilly back to the Jones Bank to resume recovery of moorings. It all went incredibly well, and we even managed to retrieve the ADCP we thought was stuck in the mud. Lots of relieved physicists on board, who could turn their energy to boxing up equipment ready for our return to Falmouth on Sunday.

Not so the seabirders. We had got hold of some mackerel left over from Inigo's experiments and proceeded to chop it up, mixed with cooking oil and cornflakes. If we were going to go over the continental shelf edge, we wanted to give ourselves a fighting chance at seeing some good birds.

Dawn of 25th - approaching Little Sole Bank

I'm somewhat surprised to find that in spite of all the good words said in the bar last night, I'm the only person up in time for dawn. Eventually a few bed-heads stagger to the observation boxes once it has got light. We arrive at the first CTD station just before breakfast, but we've seen a group of common dolphins approach the ship. Reasonable omen.

At the station, we start to throw small quantities of mackerel and our "chum" mixture over the side, and gradually the nearby gannets and fulmars cotton on to what's happening. Then the local storm-petrels start to patter and dip on the slick of mackerel bits spreading from the rear of the boat. We scour the flock looking for an unusual petrel, when a Cory's shearwater flaps lazily past, interested by the smell, but not really that interested. A reasonable attempt at luring something rare to the boat, but not quite the full cigar.

Stormies LOVE our chum

We steam to the next station for a few hours. The main interest on passage is a sooty shearwater near the point where the continental shelf edge starts to drop away. The physicists are getting excited, because sand-bank ripples are setting off tidal circulation and mixing of the water column. We're getting excited because we see a notable increase in storm-petrel numbers. It's all getting very busy and we stop at the perfect spot. Over goes the chum and mackerel bits, and we've soon accumulated a flock of twenty or so stormies behind the ship, some coming incredibly close. We're so busy chucking chum over the side, we forget to keep checking the flock. Mark remembers and plonks his binoculars straight onto a Wilson's storm-petrel. Woohoo!!

It doesn't seem to fly particularly differently from the other stormies or use the characteristic "hanging" feeding method or butterfly flights. However, it is noticeably larger than the stormies, with broader wings, a distinct paler carpal bar, and a forked wing tip on both sides where it is moulting its flight feathers. The legs are very long and project well beyond the tail, and the white of the rump wraps a long way round toward the vent and a little up the flanks. It also lacks the white stripe on the under-wing. A wee cracker and well worth the wait.

Andy, Adam and Mark celebrate the Wilson's storm-petrel

Once the CTDs and the plankton samples have been taken, we continue over the shelf edge and into deep water. I notice that the water is starting to come over the top of my wellies, so it must be deep here. Three sooty shearwaters drift past, and we see plenty more stormies. A few groups of dolphins put in a brief show, but we never get good enough views to see what species they are. Then John Beaton, who is sunning himself on the observation deck shouts "thar she blows". He's seen a whale blowing in the far distance. We alert the other scientists and wait until we get closer. Eventually we see the classic sequence - a tall blow, brief wait, long rounded back, then see a fairly tall pronounced sickle dorsal fin, dark grey back. FIN WHALE. Woohoo. But it doesn't stop there. We see another eleven before we reach the final CTD station.

We put out the remainder of the chum at a spot where the sea is 1500m deep. And we manage to attract absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Sweet Fanny Adams. Oh well. But a small group of dolphins show a bit of interest in the ship, and we continue to see fin whales keeping their distance as they pass us.

Common dolphin by the ship



There were a couple of other rituals to complete. Firstly, we attached one of the alarm watches to the CTD before it goes down to the depths of 1500 metres to see if it still goes beep beep beep (see earlier postings). And lots of the scientists scribble onto polystyrene cups and attach these to the CTD.

Two things happen - the cups shrink to about one quarter of their original size, and that watch still goes beep beep f***ing beep.

But what a fantastic day, and wonderful reward for the long, dreary hours we spent on the Jones Bank

See what happens to you when you go to deep water - your head gets bigger!

We finished the evening watching the sun go down, the distant blows of fin whales and five Cory's shearwaters that came to take a look at us. As the sun set we all saw a bit of a green flash. Woohoo!

Thursday 24 July 2008

24 July - Thursday part 1

At breakfast, we find ourselves just south of the Isles of Scilly on a pleasant day. I can see St Agnes and all the other islands and can make out my favourite pub, the Turk's Head. I can smell the crab salad sandwiches from here. It's all rather nostalgic and I know I must return some time soon.

After breakfast, the Isles of Scilly RNLI lifeboat comes sweeping out and takes the stricken Crystal Sea's ropes and tows them into St Mary's hopefully to cut free the rope from their propeller. They've suffered some very bad luck on this cruise. I spent some of last night trying to persuade Beth that she isn't jinxed and that this doesn't have anything to do with a gypsy curse. I'm not sure she's convinced though.




We're free to go back to the Jones Bank and recover the last few moorings. I see a nice sooty shearwater and arctic skua in the space of a few minutes.

RNLI towing the Crystal Sea into Hugh Town past the island of St Agnes

23 July - Wednesday

Today was a bit of an odd day. Both Mark and I were feeling under the weather. Although we were both in the bar last night, it wasn't anything to do with the 25 cans of beer we had each. Actually (serioushly), I think I had a migraine, which is very unusual for me.

The crew of the ship and the physicists have been recovering moorings and other kit from the seabed all morning. They're having mixed success, and we've been called up to the bridge on a couple of occasions to help search for frames that might have surfaced. One of the key ADCPs appears to be stuck in the mud on the seabed.

The Crystal Sea under tow

At lunch I see Beth, who is trying to collect fisheries data on this cruise, looking like thunder. The trawler that had to have a crew member winched off, had been doing very well, but they have just run over a stray rope in the sea and got it wrapped around their propeller. They're trying to free it, but not very hopeful. Later, they radio the ship to report that the rope is firmly around the propeller. The coastguard is completely swamped with a mayday call for a missing yacht, can we tow them into the Scillies please. We don't have much choice, and have to break off from the mooring recovery to attend to the striken trawler. We throw a rope to the Crystal Sea and start to tow them back to the Isles of Scilly, ETA some time in the morning. The three birders and Clare, the cetacean-listener look glum at the prospect of missing out on our jolly to the shelf edge.

While waiting to get the ropes sorted I see and photograph an odd looking gannet (see left). Look at the dark line extending down its throat, and the dark feathering around the eyes. And here's a photo of a similar aged northern gannet (right) for comparison. What chance of this being a Cape gannet I wonder? I'm not certain, but I think I saw this bird fly up from the water and show a few white secondaries, which would rule out a Cape gannet if true. Please feel free to express opinions on the identity of this bird in the comments.

I'd just finished photographing this bird when Deborah passed and asked if I had seen anything interesting. I was about to explain "probably not", when out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else. Yippeee, a great shearwater. I got the others, and eventually, we were treated to a superb fly-by after it refused to give up any meals to two bonxies (I once saw a bonxie chase a great shearwater for 40 minutes near the Hebrides once, and still not get a meal out of the shearwater. Apparently they're past masters at not giving in to the bonxie bully-boys). We have a go at chumming to see if we can get the odd gannet back, but with no luck. We later here that the shelf-edge trip is still on. Yippee.

In the evening, the Aberdeen team slaughtered the POL and SAMS teams at Trivial Pursuit, even though they had several hundred people each in their teams to our six.

Tuesday 22 July 2008

22 July - Tuesday

You wait and wait for a no 18 bus to come along, then they all come along at once. And so it was on the boat for us, waiting all cruise for something to happen, then everything happens at once.

As part of the study, two Cornish fishing boats have been hired to catch fish in the area, so that we can confirm the identity of fish shoals we have seen on the echosounders. Modern echosounders are pretty sophisticated and can be used to identify the number of fish under the ship, and hint at what species they might be. to be certain of the fish species, it is important to try and catch samples from different parts of the study area. There have been a number of French fishing boats in the area, and we had to ask them to avoid the area where all of our moorings are set, for the safety of our kit, and also for the safety of their fishing gear.

One of the fishing boats failed to make it out here - they had engine trouble and had to limp back to port. The other made it out here this morning and duly started fishing in the areas we needed information from. Eventually, the French boats were clearly getting a bit miffed that this Cornish boat was allowed to fish on "their patch" and started using aggressive tactics to try and shift him, such as cutting across his bows. Eventually, one of the boats managed to catch one of the moorings in his net, and dragged part of it to the surface. You could hear the blue language from the physicists throughout the ship at the thought of all their expensive gear eventually being damaged.

We steamed over to there to warn off the aggressive boat, and attempted to recover the mooring. It was an ADCP device. There, so now you know. OK it stands for Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (thanks Clare) and measures water turbulence from the sea bed in the water above it. Because the French boat had cut a rope down to the mooring, they had to deploy an emergency recovery procedure. You send an acoustic signal to the device to uncouple it from weights that hold it down, and in theory, it rises to the surface. After an anxious wait, this indeed worked, and the crew were able to recover the ADCP onto the ship.



Still bristling from the unsavoury incident, we continued on our way to the next point for stationary counts. Then an urgent message came in from the fishing boat we had chartered. One of the crew had got his hand caught and lost the tops of his fingers. Ouch. Within half an hour, a helicopter arrived on the scene from Culdrose, winched someone down on the trawler, winched the poor guy onto the helicopter and off to hospital. Wow, that was efficient. Apparently the incident wasn't too serious, and the Maritime Coastguard Agency didn't want the boat to come back to port for an investigation. The price of fish is higher for some than others.

We were all feeling a bit shitty, but something started to go right. As we turned away from the fishing boat, we suddenly realised we were surrounded by common dolphins, and some of them came to the side of the boat to play. Dolphins have an unerring ability to lift the spirits, and today was no exception.

A common dolphin



Fulmar, aka TNB
It has been mirror-calm today, and we have been able to spot birds some considerable distance away. Apart from the usual gannets, we have seen lots of fulmars, a lot of storm-petrels - still no Wilson's petrel for me and a few other nice seabirds. We saw something I have never seen before, a couple of breaching sunfish. Yes, jumping clean out of the water. According to Wikipedia, they can jump over ten feet high. A racing pigeon landed on the ship - its feet were covered in oil - and tried to befriend Mark. Well he needs a few friends.

Over tea, I learned of the third thing that had gone wrong. The ADCP suffered a serious formatting error on the data card - all the current data it had been logging was lost. Corrupted. Completely B******ed.

20 & 21 July - Sunday and Monday

I'd like to report that we've been seeing wonderful seabirds and there have been dolphins dancing on the wave tops, but it's not been like that.

On the Sunday, we steamed in a circuit around the flat "control" site that is set away from the main bank. Only trouble is that its not a true control site because the oceanographers discovered an unexpected flow of the currents from the edge of the bank to this particular area, presumably enriching it with nutrients. So that scuppers that plan a bit. We didn't see anything special in the area although Mark and Adam saw an unidentified large shearwater in the evening around a French stern trawler that strayed into our area.

A young gannet


On Monday, we did stationary point counts on the edge of the bank. This was a repeat of stationary counts we did at the start of the cruise when the weather was quite bad and adding its own mixing to the water column. The weather has improved considerably, and it has added a lazy Sunday afternoon feel to proceedings, except its Monday. Our stationary counts have been punctuated by occasional stray trawlers through the area, which is a bit of a pest. It has been interesting that we have also seen quite a bit of searching and feeding behaviour during these counts, and that these birds were continuing to feed even when a trawler passed through the area. It must be a bit like birds sticking to the healthy food even when there's a relatively easy, relatively unhealthy meal available nearby. The equivalent to salad v's BicMac.

Oi, that trawler's stolen our birds!

Mark and I saw a couple of very distant large shearwaters while watching a rather spectacular sunset. They were far too distant to do anything with.

Sunday 20 July 2008

19 July - Saturday 2

A few more sadistic suggestions have been put forward on the boat for the fate of the errant watch. The worst appears to be to dip it in liquid nitrogen.

Today we have been doing point counts and line transects around the north side of the Jones Bank and in a line over the bank. When we reached the bank, all life seemed to have been sucked from the sea. It was as if the Dementors had paid a call. Our point counts from here were Dull Dull Dull with no birds over a three hour period, apart from one associated gannet that was stupid enough to be in the count area at the time of a count. Here is the datasheet as proof. In case you were wondering what FFS stands for on the sheet, it was Adam's hand-writing and I didn't understand what it meant.



At the start of the day, Adam picked out a very distant group of gannets that were swooping low over the sea as if there were dolphins, but they were just two far away to tell. We called in Clare and she decided to see if she could hear them vocalising. To do this, she used a sonobuoy. These are derived from devices that used to be thrown out of military aircraft to listen out for enemy submarines. It was discovered that you could also hear whales, and with modification of the electronics to listen to a wider range of sound frequencies, it is possible to hear smaller species.

The photos illustrate the sequence for deployment of a Sonobuoy. It is a metallic cylinder that looks like a mini depth-charge and is thrown over the side of the ship. Then there is an anxious wait to see if the a small inflatable bag bobs to the surface (not guaranteed). The bag contains an antenna that connects to the electronics and the hydrophone. The device emits a radio signal to transmit all the noises in the water detected by the hydrophone. It is Clare's job to listen out for any noises that would come from a whale, dolphin or porpoise. In this case, unfortunately, we drew a blank.

Saturday 19 July 2008

19 July - Saturday

I should have highlighted the official blog for this cruise that is being compiled by Jonathan Sharples. He is the cruise leader and the person who has to deal with all the flak and somehow manages to stay calm, collected and above all, cheerful. Click the link above to see his account of events so far.

So far, the suggestions for the watch are to:

a) put it inside a rotten mackerel and see if we can photograph Inigo's conger eel demolish it.
b) attach it to the CTD and see if it beeps after being taken down to 500m depth off the continental shelf edge.

If you can't think of any other suggestions, please vote for either of the above. Do this by adding a comment to this message.

Friday 18 July 2008

18 July - Friday

For the last couple of days we have been steaming around the edge of the Jones Bank towing the "Scanfish" to detect the red dye (rhodamine) that was released a couple of days ago, and thus study the dispersal of water in the sea.

We have been doing line transect surveys at the same time, and have suffered a great deal of gannet pollution. They haven't been doing much interesting either.

We have taken to thinking of suitable revenge to inflict on the watch / countdown timer at the end of cruise. This is penance for the irritating alarm that goes off every minute without fail. Suggestions gratefully received, we promise to record in detail the revenge being inflicted.

17 July - Thursday

GAN A 6 1 F 9 49 1

16 July - Wednesday

Gannets

Wednesday 16 July 2008

15 July - Wednesday

We have had another day of watching gannets. Don't get me wrong, I am very fond of gannets and love watching them feeding. To me, there is little more exhilirating than watching a gannet nut the water from a start of about 200 feet. I can't help but think it must hurt. However, there is a limit to how much time I can spend watching the same gannets. We have a slow start today after the turbulence profiler breaks. Eventually, we get started on the scanfish survey around the bank edge. We see a Manx shearwater on each of our three circuits around the buoys this evening.

Beth is tearing her hair out. After months of preparation and getting agreement from different fishing groups to prevent any of them getting in the way of this study, one of them has set his gill nets out across the very bit of the bank we are trying to study, and repeated attempts to get him to move are falling on deaf ears. Bloody-minded or what. We almost certainly snagged and broke the scanfish earlier in the cruise when he set the nets before we knew what he'd done.

Today's spotlight is on Inigo Martinez' (there should be a squiggle above the 'n' in Inigo) work on board. He is doing a PhD in the waters around the UK, based at the Aberdeen Marine Laboratory. On this cruise, he is doing a photo-study of fishes on the sea bed. He has a camera and flash guns attached to a frame and at the base, a baited platform with a graticule for measuring the fish lengths. These are timed to go off at one-minute intervals. All the kit has to withstand the water pressure at the sea bed, and of course mustn't leak.


Bringing the rig on board and retrieving the camera

He has had anxious times, because when the camera is deployed, he doesn't know if it has worked at all until he attempted to retrieve the apparatus about 24 hours later. The camera takes one photo every minute of a platform beneath the camera that is baited with mackerel. If it works well, all kinds of creatures come into the bait. He has seen some interesting things, including lots of Nephrops (Norway lobster, or scampi if you prefer), baby squid, haddock and whiting. Here is the star photo from the trip so far, a rather large conger eel, measured at 1.7 metres.

Monster conger eel

Tuesday 15 July 2008

14 July - Monday

After a slow start for us while various water and mud samples were collected in the morning, we finally got started with stationary counts on the slope of Jones Bank again. This time we are doing the counts during a neap tide, when tides are not strong enough to set off the "internal waves" in the thermocline.

We find ourselves in a gannet desert. Occasionally, the odd bird does something interesting, like start to feed or at least start to search for food, but there are a lot of birds not doing very much. Occasionally, we see the odd storm-petrel (but not many), and certainly no sniff of any Cory's shearwaters this time. We have seen quite a few sunfish, now that the wind has eased off a bit. I tried to get a photo of two that passed close to the ship, but didn't have my digiscoping kit with me. I thought I'd got something by holding my camera to my binoculars, but have since seen Clare's shots, and feel too embarrased to put mine on this blog, knowing that her photos are just one click away.

Instead, I'm going to include a lovely photo of a kestrel that Pat sent me (thanks Pat!). She too the photo during an uplifting day near Whitley Bay at the weekend.

Monday 14 July 2008

13 July - Sunday

We spent most of the day circuiting around the "flat control" station where we did our point counts yesterday. This allowed us to use line transect methods and cover a lot more ground. The hypothesis being tested is that at a flat site, there should be less feeding activity at the bank by seabirds and that there is no tidal cycle to whatever feeding there is.

Unfortunately, the gannets don't appear to have read the text book. We saw several time the amount of feeding, although there appeared also to be a fairly random spread across locations and tidal cycle.

The rare bird of the day was a puffin. How cute. The rare mammal of the day was a grey seal.

Today's focus on other peoples' work is the biochemists from SAMS (Scottish Association of Marine Science) at Dunstaffnage, near Oban.



Stevie, Morton and Jason preparing the mega-corer

At each station, they are taking a number of samples from the sea bed and the water. The device above (called a mega-corer) takes samples of mud and sand for the sea bed (core samples). These are being analysed to look at levels of heavy metals from what should be a pristine area well away from most sources of pollutants. Sadly, this is not the case from other similar areas, and it is a good way to monitor the levels of pollution of, for example, mercury.

Another device, called a CTD, which stands for conductivity temperature depth. That's it in the photo above. At a basic level it does what it says on the tin; it measures conductivity (which is also a measure of sea salinity) and temperature at different depths below the ship. This allows us to see something called a thermocline, which is stable layers of warm, lower salinity water that is less dense and and floats above colder, higher salinity water. But the CTD is doing much more than this (you can measure temperature and salinity with tiny bits of kit). The plastic tubes collect samples of water at different depths too to test for nutrients, bacteria, phytoplankton (microscopic plants).

Debbie, Keith and Sharon praying to the CTD god

The biochemists from SAMS are taking these different water samples and carrying out all kinds of experiments on the water. They are even trying to isolate bacteria that could be used for breaking down oil pollution, and also the alga that causes harmful red tides (paralytic shellfish poisoning.

OK, just taking off
water samples

Debbie and Romaine ready
to fight the water samples

The denser water below the thermocline tends to be mixed, and full of nutrients circulating and mixing from the sea bed. However, the thermocline forms a barrier that inhibits the flow of nutrients to the levels nearer the surface. These can become depleted of nutrients and therefore all the beasties that need these to prosper near the surface. Here, the thermocline is sitting at about 50 metres below the sea surface - well out of reach of the gannets we are seeing feeding in the area.

So it becomes interesting to see what happens when something like the Jones Bank agitates the water at the thermocline and potentially injects nutrients into upper layers of the thermocline, even as far as the surface. The folks from SAMS are testing to see if nutrients are indeed being brought into the surface layers and if there is enhanced phytoplankton growth in these areas.

Sunday 13 July 2008

12 July - Saturday

Today we are doing point counts all day at one of the moorings. There is a total of four moorings - three are arranged in a line at the edge of the Jones Bank (one on top, one on the slope and one on the flat area just off the bank) and a fourth in a flat control site a bit away from the bank. The expectation is that there will be lots of interesting turbulence and other physical and biological activity around the edge of the bank, and very little at the flat control site. So today we are at the flat control site, anticipating that there will be little pattern to the seabird activity here.

The weather is still on the edge of turning really nice, but not quite there. After doing the early watch, I try to get my head down in my cabin for some sleep. I have dozed off for 30 seconds when there is a bang on the door - the lads have just seen a Wilson's storm-petrel, a rare wanderer from the southern oceans. I try to orientate, and find my way through the labyrinth of corridors and stairways to the fo'csle deck. They think they might still see it, but they're not sure. I can only see the common European storm-petrels, but talking to them, they undoubtedly saw the confusingly similar "Wilson's". I'm pleased for them, they're on a high now, but it would have been nice to catch up with it myself. Hopefully, with the weather easing, there should be more opportunities.

I have taken my small Nikon telescope to the observation box in case that "opportunity" comes sooner rather than later. It's perfect for this situation, because its small and light enough to be portable, it adds a bit more magnification to see distant birds more clearly, and has a wide field of view so it is possible to find and follow birds. I use it to watch a small ocean sunfish that is basking at the surface. I forget to use it when a Pomarine skua flies past! I have the attachments for connecting my digital camera to the telescope, so fire off some gratuitous shots of a dodgy lesser black-backed gull with a gammy leg. It's hard enough trying to digiscope stationary birds on dry land, where the ground doesn't move. Considering all this, and that the bird is flying far away, the results aren't bad. I could, of course, have taken a much better photo without the telescope attached when the bird was gliding 10 feets off the side of the ship, but where's the challenge in that! I wonder if this is the same bird that shat on me the other day?

I give a short presentation on the work we're doing to the rest of the ship in conjunction with explaining all the other sampling that's being done on board. I kept my presentation simple because there's a very wide range of people in the audience, and none are ornithologists. Hopefully, my message got home, but the only question we get is from one of the engineers "when will I be able to do some fishing from the side of the boat?". This is a no-no on all NERC ships, but particularly for us while we are trying to tease out subtle patterns in seabird behaviour from all the other potential distractions, such as a potential easy meal off the back of the ship.

Friday 11 July 2008

11 July - Friday

The morning was taken up with collecting mud, water and plankton samples, so we caught up with paperwork. In the afternoon, we steamed along a grid, searching for the pink dye again, after Dave the electronics wizard had finished repairs to the device that detects the dye (called a Scanfish). We collected seabird data and continued to see occasional places where gannets and storm-petrels were feeding. Not much of excitement to report, I'm afraid.

So I thought I would take you on a short tour of the equipment we use, and how it has changed over the 25 or so years I have been in this business.

Firstly, the data sheets. These have changed a little since I first started, to reflect the slightly different priorities in what we record at sea. The method we has changed little over the years, and is still basically a line transect method with "snapshot" counts for flying birds - these are just point counts at regular intervals along the transect line, and are designed to freeze the flight of the birds so that we can work out their density at sea. We still use the Mark I eyeball to detect the birds, so in many ways, the clipboard represents the thing that has probably changed the least in my history of recording birds at sea.



We use time to link our bird sightings to the position of the ship when we see them. So I have shown a photograph of a clock. We used clocks in the old days just like this, but they weren't these super-duper radio-controlled clocks that are now available. At regular intervals during the day, the clock receives a signal from somewhere in the Midlands of England to update the time. This means you don't have to check your clock is reading exactly the same time used by the one to record the ship's position data.

A modern radio-controlled clock


In the olden days, we used to have to remember to keep looking at the clock, and do the snapshots at exact time intervals throughout the day. Now we have watches with timers that give an alarm at exact time intervals for us. This means we are prompted to do the snapshots and never have to deal with the contingency for when we forget to do our snapshot counts. The alarm drives you nuts though.

A watch with coutdown timer





This is one of the biggest changes since the 1980's, the portable GPS. We used to have to use something called Decca navigation. This was a network of radio beacons dotted around the coast that mariners could use to work out their position to the nearest mile. Decca licensed the only machines that could detect these signals, and the main one available was called a Decca Yachtmaster 21, a huge brute of a box that took up half the space on the average ship's bridge. You had to peer down on a screen, wait for three flashes, then quickly scribble down the numbers displayed. You then took these numbers over to a special Admiralty chart with all the Decca lanes marked on it and plotted out your position at the intersection of the readings. If you were well practiced, you could do all this and read off your position in latitude and longitude in about 60 seconds. Now we have little GPS devices that you can slip into your pocket. These log your position, accurate to 10 metres, every 10 seconds if you wish, and show your course, speed, time and all kinds of other information. At the end of the day you simply download all this information straight into your computerised database.

Talking of computers, when I started out in this business, we used to have to code all our seabird sightings using a pen onto paper sheets printed with 80 columns across. It was a horrendously labour-intensive job, and incredibly error-prone too. When laptop computers came along, and we wrote a small data entry application to computer-code all our sightings, they improved things so much that, although expensive, they paid for themselves in the first 3 months we had them.

Kids today, they don't know they're born!

Thursday 10 July 2008

10 July - Thursday part 3

There have been problems with some of the equipment that measure turbulence. The profiler, that was being winched up and down every five minutes eventually got a snag on the cable. The scanfish, that was to be used to try and detect the pink dye released yesterday, got caught on a gillnet set on the sea bed. Both are out of action and being subjected to urgent running repairs. So, in the mean time, we are towing something called a t-chain. The good news is that this will detect water turbulence in the water beneath the ship as we steam along. The bad news is that we can only do this at about 3 knots speed (that's a little bit faster than 3 mph to you land-lubbers).

So we go out to do more seabird observations. It's like birding on valium; the birds take forever to appear, and when they do, they take forever to go. It's a bit like when you've been driving on the moterway for a long time, then turn off and drive in a 30 mph zone. Actually, I don't know what it's like to bird on valium, but I imagine it must be like this. So we take most of the day to do a circuit of all the buoys that are marking out all the sensors that have been chucked into the sea. We did the same circuit three times in the same time a few days ago.

We see gannets and storm-petrels and fulmars and not much else. But the big advantage of going this slowly became clear later. We spot some distant common dolphins a long way ahead of the ship. This gives me time to tell everyone on the ship to come out and take a look. This is great, because one or two of the scientists on board have never seen dolphins before. Dolphins are always a treat to see.

10 July - Thursday part 2


Those f**king b*****d sh***hawks couldn't hold on a moment longer. In fact they couldn't hold on at all. We got a full volley from above, both barrels between the bino's. It got on my hat, the side of my face, my suit and over my Leicas. It's supposed to be good luck if you get sh*t on by a bird. I'm not so sure about that, all I know is that 10 minutes later, a torrential shower of rain came along and washed the c**p off our clothes. And it soaked us in the process.

10 July - Thursday

We've been steaming around a grid pattern since dawn. I was the lucky one whose shift meant I got a lie-in, while Adam and Mark had to start at dawn. We haven't seen much so far, apart from a sooty shearwater (perhaps the one we saw the other day?). We've been working over the top of the Jones Bank, which in theory should be a quieter area.



We've been followed by a flock of lesser black-backed gulls, using the wind to glide continuously and effortlessly above and slightly ahead of our bird boxes. I see the least flattering view of them from the bird box and am reminded that we're sat in a precarious position. But they're good birds, and know that I've dedicated my life to saving them from the evil things that humans do to seagulls. Surely they wouldn't aim a cheap shot at me?

Wednesday 9 July 2008

9 July - Wednesday

Adam and I get up at dawn to do some stationary point counts. The wind picked up and the rain came, as forecast. In the two minutes it took to walk across the fo'csle deck, we got drenched. As good as our bird boxes are, there was no way these boxes could save us from collecting s**t data. No chance for catching up on sleep for me - I'd chugged a mug of strong coffee and was still flying.

We spent the morning catching up with data coding and I managed to produce some maps. An interesting one that got folks interested was a very simple map of where we saw gannets feeding or searching for food. They were pretty much all feeding on the edge of the Jones Bank, as predicted, and in the area where there were the strongest internal waves. You're going to have to visit Clare Embling's blog for an explanation of what internal waves are, but the turbulence that causes these seems to be the key thing that makes these places such productive places for marine organisms and drive food nearer to the surface where seabirds can find it.


The rest of the day was spent collecting water samples and preparing for one of the big experiments - a seemingly innocuous release of dye. But this is no ordinary dye, it's £10,000 of
potent pink pigment. In this photo, they are preparing the hose that will pump the dye and release it at a depth of about 5o metres. We will then spend the next day or so, circling around it with special sensors to discover how it drifts through the water column and is mixed up by the turbulence generated from the bank.

I got fed up with sitting down all day and am getting concerned by the amount of good food I'm eating, so decided to try out the gym. It's a bit off-putting that you're trying to use things like a rowing machine and an exercise bike on a rolling ship. It was later that Mark pointed out to me that all of these machines involve sitting down. So no change then.

We managed to put in a couple of hours of line transecting this evening. We saw a few gannets feeding, but didn't see any Cory's shearwaters.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

8 July - Tuesday


Today was a long day that began at dawn for us and continued through the day. The ship is towing a moving vessel profiler (MVP to the TLA enthusiasts on board). We steam around a fixed oval track once every 2 hours 5 minutes for a 25 hour period (although we can't do seabird observations in the dark). This gives us a full tidal cycle - from high water, to low water, to high to low and back again. The profiler measures turbulence in the water and shows the way currents are forcing goodies (nutrients, plankton and fish) to near the surface, where there should be lots of seabirds taking advantage of them. That's the theory, although I'm not sure the seabirds are reading the whole script. But it's early days yet.

The weather in the afternoon has been quite reasonable, with moderate winds and sunshine on occasions. The fair weather has brought visitors to our observation box (here-after referred to as "bird box groupies" to see what we're up to. It's a quiet day for some of the other scientists, with no winching of instruments to be done. For us, it adds a bit of variety to a long day, and also gives us a chance to demonstrate what it is we're looking for. Some of them have been helpful: one person brought us a large bottle of water to keep us hydrated; another brought ice-creams in wafers all-round - wonderful. One scientist offered to let us photograph her beaver (see right) which was very kind, but not necessary.

Well, the weather didn't stay nice the whole time, and it started to rain around tea time. Mark and Adam saw a couple of ocean sunfish, and between us we saw 10 Cory's shearwaters plus a few great and arctic skuas. There seemed to be some consistent patterns to gannet and storm-petrel feeding. Hopefully, this will make a bit of sense when we can analyse the data. Something we saw that was very interesting was watching one of the Cory's shearwaters attempting to feed - it dipped low over the water and splashed its feet against the water, almost seeming to kick the tops of the waves. A young kiitiwake started following it, perhaps hoping to get and easy meal.