4 July - Friday

I Thought I had better introduce you to the seabird and cetacean survey team


This is me, Andy Webb adopting a strapping pose at the entrance to a bird hide. My job title with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee is Knowledge Manager, which means as much to me as it does to you! But I do know that among other things, I run our somewhat limited "Seabirds at Sea" programme, organising surveys offshore, training others to use standardised methods and supervising movement of data into publicly available databases. I didn't know I was going to be on this trip until 10 days before we sailed!




Mark Lewis is employed as a Marine Surveyor by the JNCC following on from various jobs in Aberdeen working in bars, kitchens to head chef at Estaminet. He started doing survey work for the JNCC in about 2003 and other contracts for the renewable energy industry and other offshore users. Mark has his own blog - not for the faint-hearted - which he is also updating for this trip.







Adam Batty first appeared on my radar when he participated in one of the JNCC-run training courses on recording seabirds at sea. He used to work for the consultancy Environmentally Sustainable Systems, but went on to become completely self-employed, carrying out surveys for Environmental Impact Assessments and more recently surveys for Strategic Environmental Assessments (that was an impressive sequence of eco-babble).





Enough of this. About the survey. We started doing some seabird line transect survey at dawn, and the weather was reasonable with a slight to moderate sea. We were steaming westwards about 20 miles south of the Lizard. Before breakfast, we saw a (European) storm-petrel, a couple of Manx and a Balearic shearwater. The latter species is attracting interest in the UK because it is undergoing serious declines in the west Mediterranean Sea (due mainly to fishery by-catch, apparently) yet increasing in numbers in the UK, especially off Portland Bill and at seawatching points in Cornwall and SW Wales.

After breakfast, Mark and Adam saw a couple of Cory's shearwaters (I saw the a**e end of one of them disappearing in the distance). But I got reasonable views of another one after lunch. Gradually, the weather deteriorated, and it became too much for us to work in early afternoon. So we kicked our heels, started our blogs and did various jobs in preparation for the main survey work later in the cruise.

There are a few green faces, as the wind whips up to gale force. I'm doing OK, although I took a couple of Stugeron before joining the ship in Portland. They brought a fug down on me and it was a struggle to keep awake on the dawn watch, so I had to go to my bunk to lie down after breakfast. I can't recall Stugeron doing this to me as much as this before, so I'd rather trust my sea legs and do without from now on.

In the evening, the weather died down considerably, and we were able to do some more line transects from about 10 miles SW of the Isles of Scilly, continuing westwards to the Jones Bank. All three of us were treated to close views of a fourth Cory's shearwater "wing-walking" across the waves. It was close enough for us to get a decent view of the underwing pattern and be happy that this was an Atlantic race of the species, probably from one of the colonies in the Azores or Madeira. This race shows little white on the underside of the primaries, so shows a quite "full" dark tip to the wing with a rounded border between the dark grey tip and white underwing. The nominate race (Scopoli's shearwater, found mainly in the Mediterranean) should show a more pointed white part of the underwing at the tip because they show more extensive white on the primaries at the wing point. They should also be more energetic flyers with more vigorous wing flaps, rather than the lazy style of the Atlantic race. These subtle differences between races are still somewhat poorly known, and a lot more differences have yet to be described.

We arrived at our first station on the Jones Bank in the evening. Time for the oceanographers to start throwing very expensive equipment over the side of the ship.