Andy Webb's blog

Leaving Seattle

2010-09-20T20:00:00.001Z

I spent a couple of hours birding at Nisqually Wetlands. It just pissed it down with rain, so it was a fitting way to end the trip here. Apparently it has been one of the wettest Septembers on record here. I can believe that.

I make my way back to the airport and check in with no problems to Paris only. My only criticism of the airport is the poor duty free choice. They certainly have friendly security and immigration staff here.

The final stage of the trip is a couple of days in Paris; it's his big seven-o on 22nd, so I'm helping him to celebrate.

Last big birding drive

2010-09-20T04:21:00.002Z

I get up early and take a quick look around Westport in daylight. There's a local country and western station on the radio called Bigfoot FM. All the songs are about trucks, working hard and having happy families. I never knew life was that simple.

I visit a nice wetland reserve next to the Gray's Harbour area. There are quite a few shorebirds on the mid flats. I'm joined by a couple and we discuss dowitcher identification! It turned out that they were on the pelagic yesterday, so I am treated to a lost of all the species I missed. Nice. Four lifers to be precise, but.nothing spectacular though. " so you were the Scottish guy who didn't show ". Yep, that was me alright. They give.me some tips on places to go. Many of these are part of my itinerary for today and no, I don't want to try and see bar-tailed godwit or Eurasian wigeon. They give some tips on how to find varied thrush, including correcting my impression of their call.

I go.to.a.place. called Ocean Shore and scramble along the rocky breakwater where I hope there will be some tattlers. The waves are splashing the rocks making them slippy. I find some black turnstones and settle down to scope the rocks. I get a quick look at what I'm sure must be a tattler bit it disappears. I wait 10 minutes as the splashing waves get closer to me. Eventually it appears again. In fact there are two of them. At last, I feel that my birding luck is changing.

Surf scoters in the surf off Ocean Shore

I drive up to Qualcot lakes where there are supposed to be varied thrushes. Again it looks like good habitat, but I've thought that before. I pay the full amount in the permit envelope this time. It must have worked, because 10 minutes later I'm watching a varied thrush I flushed from the trail. It Skua on a branch watching me watching it. The deep chocolate brown of its plumage is punctuated by pale orange wing bars and throat and a richer orange supercilium. All this against the setting of a misty, lush forest complete with lichen-covered tree branches and moss hanging from twigs. That was a special moment, made all the sweeter for the many miles I walked searching for one of these.

I start driving back toward Seattle, and stop at a site potentially for rufous hummingbird. There are no flowers out, and I conclude its going to be too late, unless I can find a feeder. I find a motel and start organising my bags for the return flight tomorrow.

I'm not sure if Air France are going to ne happy about me getting off in Paris instead of travelling through to Aberdeen as per my tag. It seems ridiculous, but it probably messes up their fare rules. We'll see.

Walking in Olympic Park

2010-09-20T03:46:00.002Z

I decided to take advantage of the extra time and go for a short hike in Olympic National Park at Hurricane Ridge. Supposedly there are varied thrushes here plus a few other interesting upland birds, so I decide to give it a go.

View towards Mount Olympus

I leave Port Angeles in rain and fog and ascend by car until I emerge from the gloom into clear blue skies and bright sunshine above the cloud layer. The walk is good with great scenery. I realise that all that cycling I've been doing means I can walk up some steep slopes with a pack on my back and little effort. I see more American pipits and a golden eagle sweeps by at eye level just 50m away, then it circles for another look - truly spectacular. Eagles that try that kind of stunt in north-east Scotland generally don't last very long. I also get a good look at an American kestrel.

American kestrel and cute chipmunk chewing on a seed pod

I still can't get out of my head how I messed up the pelagic date and how my usual checking system didn't spot the problem. What did I do wrong? I put it down to me being punished for not putting enough money in the envelope for a hiking permit at the reserve at Dungeness, and not being honest at the Mexican restaurant to point out that they forgot to charge me for my beer. That's utter nonsense of course.

I go to another forest reserve at Crescent Lake beside Barnes River. One of the rangers at Hurricane Ridge suggested this as a site for varied thrush. It looks very promising with lots of mature wet conifer forest. I walk for two hours through fantastic habitat, past a spectacular waterfall, but still no luck. I'm going to crack this motha f***a if it kills me!

Spectacular waterfall near Lake Crescent

I make the long drive to Westport and go to one of the fish restaurants after checking into my motel. It's packed and I look at people and wonder if any of them were on the pelagic. I wonder what they saw today?

Gutted

2010-09-18T14:31:00.002Z

Have you ever watched the film 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'? Do you remember the moment when Hugh Grant is in the church waiting for his own wedding to "duck-face" and he has just discovered that his true love Carrie, played by Andi MacDowell is separated from her husband, and this is the person he really wants to be with. He goes into a side room in the church and slowly beats his head against the stone wall and says "bugger, bugger, bugger" with such depth and feeling. For me, it's a defining moment in a great film.

There is also a word in the book "The Meaning of Liff" (the book that marries place names with no meaning, with everyday things and phenomena that have no name). I can't remember the place name but remember the phenomenon - when you know something has just gone badly wrong, but you don't know what it is yet. Yesterday, I was thinking that everything is sorted out now between now and when I leave Seattle - what could possibly go wrong now?

Well I just had both of those moments. I woke at 5:30 a.m. in my motel room in Port Angeles, and something made me think about the pelagic birding trip I've organised. Isn't that due to go on 18th? Isn't that today? Checking the booking confirmation, it certainly is today, and I'm in Port Angeles and the boat leaves from Westport, which is at least 4 hours drive away.

I'm feeling completely gutted. That boat trip was going to be the highlight of my trip and I've screwed up. I've had a month since I booked this thing for the penny to drop and I could have done something about it, even last night. I doubt there's much chance of getting a refund given this is completely my own fault, and they won't have had a chance to get a reserve at this late notice.

Oh well, there are plenty of other things I could do instead.

Dungeness spit

2010-09-18T05:31:00.003Z

I wake early. I need to sort a few things out. I book a motel for the night before the pelagic trip in Westport, sort out some money and work out my route for the next few days. Finally, I check out and go to pick up my hire car.

I've decided to take a ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island. At $15 for me and the car, I sense we're getting back to sensible prices (the Canadian dollar is quite strong now, so there aren't any bargains to be had over there just now). As you get off the ferry, you realise you've left the hustle of the big city behind and entered the rather well-heeled island community. Of course they're probably all so rich they can afford to commute daily to Seattle.

The impressive Seattle skyline from the ferry

I drive to the Dungeness area. Like its namesake in England, it is a spit made of sand and shingle, with more emphasis on the former. The spit is a long and narrow, and projects into Juan da Fuca Sound close to the southern tip of Vancouver. It's a calm day with the sun trying to force its way through the occasional fog and cloud.

Dungeness Spit and Vancouver Island (far)

Olympic National Park in background

Once again, I don't see a huge amount, but its an enjoyable day's birding. The most interesting additions to the trip list was a couple of American pipits at the end of the day. They showed exactly why they are called buff-bellied pipits, with their quite rich buff underparts, contrasting with a much greyer back. They have pure white outer tail feathers, giving away that they are related to water pipit.

I stay in a cheap, but very comfortable motel in Port Angeles, and have a substantial Mexican meal nearby - they forgot to charge me for my beer, so I give them a bigger tip.

On my own again

2010-09-18T04:40:00.005Z

We wake early and do some birding at Lake Somenos nearby. It's a bit more lively here, though not much more. I manage to pick out a Lincoln sparrow. Hurrah, a full blown lifer, though it didn't exactly knock my socks off! We add a few more birds to the trip list, including a moulting drake wood duck.

We then drive round to Swartz Bay where the ferry leaves for Vancouver. After a great breakfast at a cafe in the nearby marina, I drop off Martin for his return journey and we say our farewells.

I take the car along the coast road down to Victoria, stopping off at a number of locations to take in the view and do some birding. It's a very nice stretch of coast, with fantastic panorama views across to the gulf islands. It's pleasantly mild and the sea is flat calm. I manage to see a few new birds. Perhaps the highlight is two Sandhill cranes flying along the coast. There are a few other new spec ies for the trip, though all are fairly common, and to be expected. A wasp managed to sneak inside my shirt and start to sting me. The first was the most serious, but the others had relatively little venom in them. Other occupants in the car park in the rather refined Oak Bay must have been put off their prosciutto and mozzarello do buffalo foaccaci at the sight of a shirtless Andy swiping at a long-gone wasp!

Not a Lincoln's sparrow, but a song sparrow

A group of harlequin ducks in Oak Bay

I drop off the hire car and wander around town for one last time, picking up a map and other bits and pieces, while the heavens opened on Victoria. The ferry is delayed and full of excited American football fans from Nebraska. They are converging on Seattle for a big college game, and there to support the Huskers. I get to my hotel at midnight - two hours later than planned. US immigration is a breeze from Canada on the ferry. The hotel is rather good - the Mediterranean Inn - a little outside the centre, but all easily accessible.

Wet Wet Wet

2010-09-18T04:26:00.002Z

Today, Martin and I went walking in the woods.

We started at the lighthouse again and did the circuit, bumping into Mark Newell there. We didn't see an awful lot - nearly all the migrant birds from the previous two days had cleared out, and the bushes around the light were pretty quiet. There was still quite a bit of wildfowl passage offshore - mainly surf scoters (and mostly drakes as well). We did, however, see a greylag goose fly over. Still not sure if this was a genuine vagrant and if we should have initiated a rare bird alert.

After a hearty breakfast at a nearby breakfast joint, and we checked out, we went for a walk in a different bit of coastal woodland. We didn't see much here, and the varied thrush I wanted to see eluded me once again. We did manage a brown treecreeper which was new for the trip. Perhaps the best thing I saw (Martin missed this) was when we first arrived at a viewpoint. I raised my binoculars to a spot offshore, and instead of seeing grey sea and a few waves, I got a face full of humpback whale. It had clearly done a lunge feed and launched half of its body clear of the water. So what I could see was the upper half of the underside of its body (all those ridges), part of its pectoral fins and water surging from the side of its huge mouth. It surfaced again and lofted its tail fluke into the air. Then we didn't see it again until much further offshore. WOW!!!!!

We walked for ages trying to see a varied thrush. But it started to rain, and didn't stop all day, so we got pretty wet and dis-spirited. We drove much of the way back to Victoria, stopping at potential places for varied thrush. All of these with no luck. We found an OK motel in Duncan and had a not very interesting meal at a family diner.

Will I go through my entire journey in Canada without seeing a single lifer?

Do bears shit in the woods?

2010-09-15T05:02:00.006Z

We get up early and travel back to Amphitrite Point for more birding. Except it is foggy with limited visibility. We see a few additional species, including Macgillivary's and Wilson's warblers. We bump into Stefan Garthe and Philip Schwemmer who were both at the conference. They say they've seen a varied thrush, which is high on my hit list. How very dare they!

Steller's Jay

No luck with the varied thrush, so we continue on our way and visit some interesting boggy area and some virgin rain forest. The latter site seemed to reek of decay. The boardwalk weaved a way through the permanently wet forest, among rotting trees and talls stands of cypress, hemlock and what looks like leylandii. We bump into the German contingent again at each of these sites.

In the Pacific Rim virgin rainforest

We continue up to Tofino where there are mud flats. The town is very commercial, aimed at tourists. We see Stefan and Phillip there again! There is a small viewing platform overlooking the mudflats. We bump into Shane Wolseley from Northern Ireland (he is organising the BTO Atlas there). There are a few distant waders there - most likely Western sandpipers, but who knows at that range. A young bald eagle flies into a tree and makes quite a racket. We don't see much in the way of shorebirds.

Martin overlooking the Tofino mud flats

Our last port of call is to the Thornton Creek salmon hatchery, where they have been trying to augment the local salmon stocks. Its a drive along a rough track, but has a reputation for being a good place to watch black bears, when the salmon start to run.

When we arrive, there is a black bear in the river bed. It spots us and slowly ambles off up the bank and disappears into the vegetation. I walked along the boardwalk and onto a narrow bridge over the river to take a photo of the waterfall. Unbeknown to me, another black bear is ambling down the bank, and I see it just 20m away walking toward me and the bridge. I retreat back onto the boardwalk, facing it, and let it do its thing. This bear clearly is used to humans. It spends its time plonking its bum into the stream (is this what bears do when they want to go to the toilet, but are too shy to do it in the open? In fact it is panting, and seems to be using the river to cool off. We get amazing looks at this bear - just us and nobody else. It finally climbs up onto the same side of the river bank as us, onto the boardwalk and ambles away. Truly amazing.

Nice cascade, but what else is there to look out for?

Just as we are about to depart, the Germans arrive, and we grip them off with our bear photos.

In the evening, after an average Chinese meal, we bump into Mark Newell from CEH and Matt Parsons. They are teamed up for their travelling around this part of Vancouver Island.

Drive to Ucluelet

2010-09-15T04:51:00.002Z

I pack my bags, check out and meet with Martin Heubeck. We're going to drive over to the west side of Vancouver Island and spend a few days birding together. We pick up a hire car and set off on the journey. I'm tired, but manage to stay alert for the driving. The dirve would have been really pretty, except there was low cloud and occasional rain for most of the way. We manage to see two black bears crossing the road in front of us. Wow!

We found a motel in Ucluelet, and decide to take a walk around the lighthouse at Amphitrite Point, which is the southernmost part of the peninsula. We see a few migrants, such as yellow and the amazing Townsend's warblers. There were Swainson's and hermit thrushes grovelling in the undergrowth. Offshore we see 5-6 humpback whales and two bald eagles feeding in the sea nearby. Also we see a couple of marbled murrelets, and a steady stream of divers and scoters migrating offshore.

Coastline around Amphitrite Point

Kayaking around Oak Bay

2010-09-13T05:32:00.004Z

Today, with the conference finished, I went on one of the organised post-conference trips. There was a seabird and whale pelagic trip, which didn't look too exciting. I decided to go kayaking; something I haven't really done before (excluding some river canoeing I did as a kid), but am told you can approach wildlife very closely and I thought it would be something good to do around Portlethen. Marischal (the conference organiser) took us to the launch point. He's an interesting guy. His family is from Broughty Ferry originally. He used to pronounce his name the Aberdeen way (i.e. Marshall), but has been forced to pronounce it as spelled because it confused too many people.

Six of us paddled out, plus the guide. We were in tandem kayaks - I was teamed up with a guy from New Brunswick on the Canadian east coast called Dave. He has done a bit of kayaking before, so that was helpful for me as a novice. It was drizzling with rain most of the time.

We paddled to some islands, where there were common seals, and some cute river otters. We also saw a grey whale pass behind us. All around the islands there were moulting harlequin ducks - not as smart as they could be, but still amazing to see them. There were black turnstones and surfbirds on the shoreline, and a couple of belted kingfishers.

The intrepid paddlers

I survived the day pretty well. It even brightened up, and we could see across to the mainland. My shoulders were a bit sore by the end of the day, as were my feet from steering the rudder. I figure my swimming must have helped my shoulders.

In the evening, I met up with Martin Heubeck and Kees Camphuysen for a meal and a drink. We go into Chinatown and have an amazing meal!

Harlequin ducks and black oystercacher

Final day of conference

2010-09-13T04:34:00.004Z

I woke up to a beautiful day, so after a working breakfast with Scott Schaffer, I take a few photos in town around the harbour. It's an attractive small city, probably about the same size as Aberdeen.

Today, all theworkshops have to report back to the plenary session of the main conference. Scott Shaffer and I present the at-sea and tracking workshop outcomes.

In the evening it's the closing banquet. A lot of people get into the hall for the meal, which is OK, but not worth the $70 price tag. There are the usual announcements in which people are thanked. Mark T gives the results of the student poster and presentation awards. Irritatingly, he awards first prize for posters to a pretty blond undergraduate, and remarks on a displayed photo of her next to her poster that "beautifully put together". Accidental, I think. David Irons receives a standing ovation to thank him for all his hard work in making the conference happen. He gives an acceptance speech in which hr is clearly choked.

A pastiche 1970's Canadian rock band provide the entertainment. This conference's theme, other than the usual loud shirts, is wearing a tie around your head as a head band. Hmmm.

Day 3 of the conference

2010-09-11T17:41:00.003Z

Wow, that was a really good sleep!

I'm giving my talk today about the experience of getting the two big Special Protection Areas classified in Liverpool Bay and the Outer Thames Estuary. I'm much calmer now after getting the first workshop out of the way. That's a bit worrying, because I need some adrenaline to help me perform for my talk. I've got a total of 20 minutes to get my point across, and I know I've got too much material.

Linda gives a talk just before mine on the offshore SPAs, and does another solid job. My turn now, and it goes well. I focus on how this is a real life scientific solution created under extreme pressure. There seemed to be quite a few extra people turn up, which is quite flattering. I run short of time at the end, and I have to rush some of the more complex slides toward the end, but I manage to leave enough time for a question at the end. It's a good one, about how you can use the the legislation to protect their prey fish in finding a solution, including dealing with their migration outside the boundary. I think I give a good answer about how a plan or project outside the boundary could trigger protective measures based on the protective requirements of the species within the boundary.

We have to prepare some material for another workshop which about combining analyses from a global at-sea seabird database with a similar tracking database. I'm co-convening this with Cleo Small from Birdlife International. We both feel shattered, but manage to pull together an agenda. It goes well. The presentations are all really focused and it has much more of a workshop feel about it, rather than a talk-shop. Lots of exchange of interesting ideas of how to overcome the analytical challenges of viewing these different datasets. Poor Cleo is shattered, and asks me if I can chair the discussion session. I do what I can, and feel the discussion dry up a bit at times, but it goes OK, and people seem happy with how it went.

I go for a drink after the poster paper session, and both Linda (who talked some more about her tern tracking work) and James Grecian made a point about how helpful they found the workshop. That was really nice of them to say so.

Kees Camphuysen and Jim at the poster session

Day 2 of the conference

2010-09-11T17:31:00.002Z

I realise I have entered into some kind of battle with my maid (that sounds sooo decadent!). I realise for two mornings running, I have thrown out my old disposable razor, and she has put it back neatly beside the wash basin (that's the one in my main bathroom of course). I resort to snapping the razor in half.

I went to Linda's presentation on the tern tracking work. She was invited to give her talk, so it's one of the preferred talks. She's as nervous as hell, but of course she does a good job, and I see lots of people nodding their heads, which is a good sign.

I'm feeling a bit better about my workshop. I get a chance to run through things with Kathy Kuletz and I hear about a couple of people who are definitely going to attend. One of the problems I spotted was that there is a clash between my database workshop and another workshop organised on seabird spatial ecology which will take people away from my workshop.

It goes well. Some big players attend my workshop and apart from a couple of the giving presenters going off-script, it is well received and everyone really positive about the idea of data sharing, and many sign up to get involved in developing things further. Ben Best from OBIS-Seamap is really helpful and says lots of really good things.

I went for something to eat with Jim, Kees Camphuysen, Martin Heubeck. I fall asleep before my food arrives, and then again afterwards. I must have been shattered.

Day 1 of the conference

2010-09-11T17:25:00.003Z

After the social held at the BC Museum last night, today seemed to go by in a whirl. We started with the opening presentations by the great and the good, which included a video presentation by Prince Charles (he's a passionate supporter of the Save the Albatross Campaign). The conference is organised in five parallel sessions, so people charge about between different halls, so many of the 850 or so delegates charge off at the end of each talk to see the next one they've marked off on their agenda.

I'm heavily involved in what are called the Legacy Workshops, designed to link up different databases around the world using the internet and through clever technology, create what would appear as a World Seabird Database. We hear the first of these presentations and the discussion of how this might progress. I'm starting to feel quite nervous about my workshop and how it's all going to go tomorrow.

Ferry to Vancouver Island

2010-09-09T00:38:00.005Z

I woke early and took a cab to the ferry terminal. Steve Votier was there - his intended boat-plane trip to Victoria was cancelled because of bad weather. I don't think he was disappointed to be going on the boat, however.

It was a dull overcast morning with the threat of drizzle hanging over us as we steamed up Puget Sound. This was a fast (30 knots) catamaran-type ferry, so we didn't get much time to look at things. But occasionally we got good looks at things. By the end of the trip, we had seen a considerable selection of seabirds and cetaceans. The highlights were a fork-tailed storm-petrel, 2 pink-footed shearwaters, a northern fulmar (dark one), plenty of tufted puffins, rhinocerous auklets, grey phalaropes, a couple of red-necked grebes and a killer whale. It was worth getting cold for.

I'm staying at the Fairmont Empress - special rates for conference-goers, but plush all the same. After checking in at the hotel and also registering at the conference, I went up to my room. They upgraded me to a suite. Bloody heck, that only ever happens to other people, not me. The room has quite a good view (not of the harbour, sadly). The bed is wider than it is long. There are two TVs in the suite and two bathrooms for some reason. I think I'm going to enjoy retiring to my quarters.

My bedroom and my drawing room

Night view from my room

In the evening, there was a reception held at the Vancouver museum. Lots of food and drink among lots of native American historical items. Good fun.

Sleepless in Seattle

2010-09-08T12:16:00.005Z

After a 4:30 am start from home (thanks for the lift George, you're a Toff). I took Air France from Aberdeen to Paris, then a rapid transfer for their flight to Seattle.

I've heard dire things about Air France's record with luggage during transfers, and also about the long queues for immigration at Seattle. None of these proved the case, and my luggage and I staggered into the arrivals hall at 1pm, about 1 hour after landing. Note to anyone who's planning a trip in the future - the ESTA system for immigration means you don't have to fill out a white landing card during the flight like you used to (but you still have to fill out the customs form), even though Air France told everyone to do this. The immigration person simply tore up my neatly filled-out white card. He was friendly too, unlike previous experiences. I met up with a few other folks who were on the same flight as me, including Steve Votier and Henri Weimerskirch.

Because of my low expectations for a speedy turnaround at the airport, I pre-booked a hotel to stay a night there and catch the ferry the following morning to Victoria. I took an electric train into Seattle (only $2.50, quick and efficient - cheaper than the short bus journey from Aberdeen to Torry!). While waiting for my room to be ready, I took a wander around the Pioneer Square area in the half-drizzle - quite interesting. I stumbled upon the Pike Street Farmers Market, which was fantastic. I'll upload some photos when I get a chance. It was a sea of people, colour and smells, with fresh fish stalls, arts and crafts and lots of flower sellers (substantial bunches at $5 each).

I ate at a Brazilian restaurant, but my body was starting to shut down - it took just one caiparihna, so I returned to the hotel and sleep.

Of course, my body was getting ready to wake up again and at 3 a.m. I ended up doing some work on my presentations, re-organising my luggage etc ready for my early morning ferry to Canada.

Andy is travelling again

2010-09-07T19:23:00.001Z

I’ve decided to resume my blog while on my travels.

I am attending the inaugural World Seabird Conference at Victoria on the island of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. I have decided to add on some extra days at the end of the conference to see something of Vancouver Island (it’s supposed to be beautiful, and should be interesting for birds on migration) and also do a quick tour of Washington state over the border in USA. I’ll finish the trip with a couple of days in Paris, where I’ll meet with George to help him celebrate a significant birthday. This conference is going to be far from play time, although I hope to enjoy myself as much as I can. I am presenting a paper to the conference about protected areas at sea for seabirds. I am also co-organising two different workshops, the first about amalgamating databases for seabird surveys at sea, and the other about combining information from these types of databases with those from satellite tracking studies. I hope to keep you appraised of what happens over the next 2 ½ weeks.

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Gratuitous posting of photos

2009-10-18T14:12:00.002Z

Thought I would post this nice pic of a rock pipit I took yesterday on my patch. No better reason than I was interested to see if the search and geotag features work.

Rosy cheeks

2009-06-22T21:58:00.006+01:00

We leave Amble with Graeme in 'Moby' in a bit of a hurry. We misjudged the tide, and it's going out fast - we don't want to get trapped in the marina!

It's perfect weather with a beautiful mirror-calm sea.

We manage to follow three common terns on complete foraging trips and a couple of Arctics. One of the latter travelled fast to an area about 20km east of the island. Once there, it gorged itself on 0-group sandeels, plunging and dipping into the surface close to the boat. We could see the sandeel still wriggling in its beak, then it would toss the fish into the air, catch it, and the fish disappear. It's fantastic to witness this amazing feeding trip, but slightly disappointing with this bird was that it gave us the slip; I'd have loved to have watched it complete the journey, ideally with a fish.

We return to the inshore and have our sandwiches close to the island. The seabirds breeding in the colony are being rather confiding, and a group of puffins swim close to take a look at us. That makes for a good photo-opportunity with my camera.

Puffins are certainly not dying here!

We decide to have another go at trying to follow a Roseate tern. Almost immediately we see an adult stroll out from the colony past us, almost begging to be tracked. Well, it would be rude not to. Graeme's son Thomas is driving, and we set off in hot pursuit. This bird is quick, very quick! We have to speed at 36 - 38 knots to keep up. And no, this bird is not trying to get away from us. We have seen very few signs that any of the terns we follow are in any way bothered by our presence. We have occasionally seen signs of avoidance when a bird stops to try and feed, if we have been too close, but we have kept back from the birds and tried to skirt around feeding concentrations.

This roseate is a bird on a mission and joins a big multi-species feeding concentration by Boulmer. It spends about 45 minutes there, stuffing its face on small sprats or herring. We see it swallow 35 fish, and it probably ate more than this. It did this all around the boat, often plunging within 20 metres of the boat, completely oblivious to us. There are other roseates in the flock, up to three others at one point. Julie is calling out its behaviours, I am writing these down, with times, distance and bearing furiously, filling page after page of the notebook. I would have loved to have spent time enjoying the privileged moment, but it is essential to collect the data. We are probably the first people ever to have obtained this detailed information for a roseate tern.

Eventually, the bird had clearly had its fill, and set off back to the colony. Flying at a mere 23 knots. I'm not surprised, the greedy b**tard stuffed so many fish into its gob. And it doesn't even take a fish back to its chick. No wonder the species is endangered - the adults are eating all the fish and leaving the chicks to starve! We follow the bird back to the colony and see it land in front of some of the numbered nest boxes looking content with itself. We note these details down and its high fives all round.

Adult roseate tern returning to its colony with a belly full of clupeids

We watch a few terns bathing close around the west side of the island. This is something we have seen them do in small flocks when they can find some sheltered water. We spot a roseate tern in one of the groups. It gets up and flies out to sea. "Follow that bird".

Common and Arctic terns bathing close inshore around Coquet

This roseate tern is no slouch either, and it heads at about 36 knots straight up to Boulmer. It by-passes a number of huge multi-species feeding assemblages. It spends over an hour patrolling close inshore between Boulmer and Alnmouth, plunging repeatedly. It's Julie's turn to note down the behaviours, and she fills six pages up during this time. Eventually, it lands on a mooring buoy and starts to preen for about 20 minutes. This doesn't seem to be a bird in a hurry to feed its chick. We notice that it is ringed, but can't read any numbers on the colour ring. It seems to be white with a green stripe.

It flies off, and we soon lose the bird - getting muddled with another roseate tern (we can see a difference, because the bird we pick up has some flight feathers missing. So we return to Amble, exhilarated by the fantastic data we've collected.

We get an update when we return. There are no chicks yet in any of the roseate nest boxes where the first bird landed, which perhaps explains why it didn't take a fish back. Apparently there are still plenty of birds that haven't hatched their eggs yet.

More little terns on a glorious day

2009-06-22T21:44:00.002+01:00

After a day off on the Saturday, we return north to look for little tern feeding areas on the north side of the Long Nanny colony. It is a glorious day, the sea is mirror calm as I look toward the Farne Islands from Seahouses. I wish I could be out there. I see Moby (Graeme Harrison's boat) out by the islands 7km away, presumably with a dive party.

Although the beach at Seahouses looks suitable, I don't see a single little tern, nor does Julie at her watch point a bit closer to the colony. We move a bit closer, and see very little activity (one bird passing (perhaps the same bird) and me seeing lots of courtship behaviour in Beadnell Bay. That's great, because we're seeing a clear pattern of this species concentrating in a narrow strip within 6km of the colony in one direction, and less than that in the other. This is entirely consistent with findings at other colonies.

When we finish, Graeme returns his dive party to Beadnell and we offer him some help with taking his boat back down to Amble (we've chartered him for an extra five days for the rest of the week). He lets me drive all the way down and take the Moby into the Marina. It's fantastic to glide effortlessly across the smooth seas at 30kn in beautiful weather. This is great for me to keep my Powerboat certificate current. I get the RHIB into the berth reasonably well - a bit more Reginald Molehusband than a smooth elegant entry. Oh well, not too bad for an unfamiliar boat.

Graeme brings 'Moby' and the North Norfolk Diving Club back into Beadnell Bay

Little terns at Embleton

2009-06-22T21:33:00.003+01:00

On Friday, the wind is still pretty strong from the north-west. We go out anyway, but get completely pasted by the spray and return to harbour after two hours.

We decide that, although we are both pretty tired and looking forward to a bit of time off, we will use the afternoon to do some watches on little tern feeding rates at selected points around their colony at Long Nanny. We watch them feeding up to about 6km south of the colony, and felt pretty confident that they were going no further than this. They seem to spend all their time feeding over the surf in sandy bays, plunging from very high above the sea into water that can be only a few tens of centimetres deep. We see plenty of fish being carried back to the colony.

The southern limit of their foraging trips appears to be the spectacular Dunstanburgh Castle.

Rough weather

2009-06-22T21:19:00.002+01:00

We have spent three days trying to get the best out of some pretty dire weather conditions. A low pressure system has brought some strong, mainly westerly winds through most of the UK. With the wind in this sector, the Northumberland coast is quite sheltered, and we find that the sea has flattened out.

On Wednesday we managed to follow a few birds, including a complete fishing trip for a common and an Arctic tern. This is pretty amazing given that the wind is blowing about force 4.

On Thursday, with the wind more firmly in the west, affording maximum shelter, we go out for about six hours. We try to follow birds with little success. We manage reasonably well for a while, then the bird turns across the wind, and the strong gusts whip spray across the boat, in our faces and obscure our view at critical times when we need to keep track of the bird. We try to follow a couple of roseate terns, but lose them each time. We do at least follow one as far as a feeding aggregation, less than 1km from the island.

We give up on this and try to spend a bit of time trying to track radio-tagged birds. This shouldn't be affected too much by the wind. Researchers from Newcastle University have tagged six more Arctic terns at the colony. We cannot detect three of those newly tagged birds, but #12 is still present from the previous tagging, and has chicks. We resolve to try and follow this bird to its feeding area. Somehow or other we cannot detect the difference between a bird at the colony and when it is flying away, and we miss #12's departure. Two hours later, and the bird has not returned to the nest.

We give up and return to harbour a couple of hours early. Somewhat discouraging, but we can't help the weather.

New boat

2009-06-22T20:59:00.005+01:00

Two boat owners tendered for the contract to follow terns, which is no small deal given that the process is somewhat off-putting. We gave both of them a piece of the cake. Now it was Paul's turn of Farne Island Divers. His boat is a Humber and about 10m long with two 225 HP engines at the back. That's a lot of grunt!

A bigger RHIB and a new antenna

We also received a new antenna to make it much easier to try and radio-track terns. We managed to detect one of the birds in the colony, but still aren't having any success detecting them at sea.

We found the boat to be very smooth at speed, especially given the calm weather, and found it very easy to follow Sandwich terns, but managed some complete runs for common and Arctics as well (i.e. watch it leave the colony, feed and take a fish back to the nest site). We noticed something - if we spend a bit of time trying to only follow birds that we see leaving the nesting areas, we seem to get more complete runs.

Sandwich tern with large sandeel. Note that it has started to moult out its crown feathers

Getting better

2009-06-22T20:51:00.003+01:00

I don't have much to report in this bit of the blog, other than that the weather is improving and so are our fortunes.

By the end of Sunday, we have managed to follow a number of birds out from the island (44 to be precise), watch them feed and bring a sandeel back to their chicks, even watching them land at their nest site.Arctic tern looking a bit like a common tern. But it's an Arctic!

Parts of Sunday, the sea went flat calm. On a day like this, lots of boats leave the local harbours and people sit and try to catch fish from them. I suspect we confused a lot of people when we charged about among them at 25 - 30 knots, with an idiot at the front pointing the way to a tern ahead of the boat. I suspect also, with our wash, we shouldn't expect to get Christmas cards from any of them.

Good news from the island, the first Roseate terns have hatched, and they counted 71 nests. Also get a text from Long Nanny wardens to say that the first little terns have also hatched.

Radio-tracking terns

2009-06-12T21:31:00.005+01:00

We sight out early on a bright sunny day from Amble Harbour into reasonably light northerly winds. There has been a small development because the team of researchers from Newcastle University managed to get permission to attach radio-tags to some Arctic terns on Coquet Island. We passed the radio tags to them yesterday, and they managed to attach three of them to breeding Arctic terns with newly hatched eggs.

We ventured out firsth thing with our over-sized antenna to listen for these three birds. Not a sausage. We decided that it would be best to chase a few birds then have another go when we could get some confirmation from Laura, the PhD student.

Julie listening out for radio-tagged terns

We decided that we needed more data for Arctic terns, so would target them for our birds to follow. We started on the east side of the island and tried to detect and identify the birds in plenty of time, so that we could get the boat moving quickly so we wouldn't lose the birds. It has proved quite a challenge to identify the birds quickly. One of the things that is particularly helpful is to see the translucent underside of the wing, when set against blue sky. Common terns show a small translucent triangle in the crook at the trailing edge of the middle part of the wing. Arctic terns on the other hand show a long tanslucent band from the armpit to the wing tips giving a stipey appearance. Along with different shape to the birds, shorter bill and usually longer tail streamers for Arctic terns, this has proved particularly helpful for sorting out the terns early.

Common tern on the left and Arctic tern on the right. Note the shorter beak and more rounded head on the Arctic tern. It also has a thinner, more distinct black trailing edge to the outer wing. The wings look to be further forward on the body, the tail looks longer as well. Although not absolutely clear in these photos, the translucent patch on the common tern is confined to the crook in the trailing edge of the wing. While the Arctic tern also seems to show the same pattern, look at its further-away wing and notice that it is translucent in the out part of that wing too.

We managed to follow one Arctic tern around a large area, as it travelled from feeding flock to feeding flock, until it clearly had managed to feed itself enough and returned to the island, some 20km away. And boy did it shift. We had to travel at 30kn to keep up with it, but got the ultimate satisfaction of seeing it disappear into the colony. Graeme, the skipper, lost his favourite hat along the way. Once we'd seen it safely back to the island, we retraced our tracks to where we thought his hat came off. And there is was, floating happily on the surface, exactly where the GPS said it should be. Champion!

We managed to follow a common tern to its feeding area, pick up a large snadeel for its chicks and return all the way to the colony. We tracked another three Arctic terns, then returned to the island to try out the radio tags again. This time we managed to get a signal, but struggle to interpret what it could mean - the birds appeared to be in the colony, but we couldn't always here the signal. At times it seemed as if the birds were at sea, but we had no way of knowing from our position whether this was actually the case, or we were getting false readings. We tried waiting for the birds to leave the colony, but after an hour and a half, decided we needed a rethink to our tactics and strategy for tracking these birds.

We finished the day with two unsuccesful trackings of Sandwich terns (they must do about 40 - 45kn when flying downwind - too fast for us), then a single Arctic tern, followed only as far as a couple of feeding plunges. It's still proving easy to lose birds. On the one hand you don't want to get too close as to disturb them while trying to feed, but if you sit off to feeding area too far, it's very easy to find yourself too far away if they move to another feeding area (which they do if unsuccessful in any area.

We have noticed that all tern species are cueing in on feeding puffins (and other auks). We watched one Arctic spend about 10 minutes in the company of a feeding puffin, often swooping or plunging every time the puffin returned to the surface with its mouthful of sandeels. While this behaviour was quite extreme, we often see terns searching for prey homing in on puffins during their foraging trips.

Monster Sandwich Trip

2009-06-11T16:40:00.004+01:00

We set out again this morning in good conditions and resolved to get more Sandwich tern tracks. Laura on the island gave us an update on the state of the tern hatchings - just about all the Sandwich tern clutches have hatched and the majority of common and Arctic terns have now hatched. Sitting waiting for our first bird of the morning, we could see streams of these three species flying into the colony with sandeels. It looks as if they are having no trouble finding these fish this year, which is great news given the difficulties they have faced in some recent years.

Coquet island - the old lighthouse buildings

At last, we got ourselves on the right line to pick up some Sandwich terns leaving the island, and we picked up the first bird as soon as we were prepared (everyone has to be safely holding on, the boat pointing in the right direction and all ready and raring to go). We then set off after the bird. If flew over shallow rocks south to Druridge Bay, but Graeme was able to maintain good speed and the crack survey team was able to maintain visual contact with it. It did a few half-hearted swoops at the sea, but seemd to be on a mission. At times, we had to travel at 35 knots to keep up with it. We passed Druridge Power Station, and still no let-up. Then Newbiggin, complete with a giant man and woman looking out to sea carved onto the harbour gantry. A couple of plunges, but this wasn't the place it wanted to be. It continued to fly strongly past Blyth harbour, complete with wind turbines on the harbour wall, and two larger turbines a short distance offshore. The bird made it to Seaton Sluice, where it seemed to have found its preferred feeding location. And boy, did it start feeding. We saw it plunge into the sea and pick up at least eight sandeels, and it scoffed every one for itself. No consideration for its chicks. It switched to feeding in the surf off Seaton Sluice, and agonisingly, we lost it when it appeared to fly into the small harbour there. It was annoying that we couldn't see it pick up a fish for its chick. I sensed when it switched to feeding in the surf that it was looking for a larger sandeel for its chicks (the ones it scoffed were all medium-sized).

We were all pretty knackered after that trip - at least 20 miles of very fast tracking and intense concentration to ensure we didn't lose visual contact, even when it flew among other birds.

We cruised back to the island. Graeme was happy for me to drive, and I managed to avoid running over someone's salmon nets, thankfully. The fisherman was looking a bit worried when we were getting near.

We tried some tracks to the north of the island, again Sandwich terns only at this stage. We managed to track some feeding from at least two other birds, then with Julie on main duty, we managed to track a bird to the point when it caught a fish and took it back to the colony - a large sandeel. Again, we tried to follow it in, but with Thomas (Graeme's son) taking the RIB as fast as he safely could, it eventually lost us, about 1km short of Coquet island. Never-the-less, we were all feeling very pleased to have got a complete fishing journey.

A successful foraging trip and we were there to witness it!

The wind was picking up rapidly, and we tried to track a couple more birds, but couldn't kept losing them when the spray blew into our faces. The wind was even too strong for switching to line transects. So we called it a day. Another very useful day.

Lots of feeding terns

2009-06-11T16:12:00.005+01:00

Julie on the left, Graeme the skipper on the right on "Moby" the RIB
Crack survey team

Today we set out in near-calm conditions and set out to do lots of tracking of terns out from the colony.

The first bird we picked was a common tern and we followed it a short distance - no more than 2km where it completed a couple of dives before fishing out a nice sandeel that it promptly took straight back to the colony. How easy and satisfying was that!

The next bird we followed was nowhere near as efficient. It took a grand tour of all the feeding flocks on the east side of the island, some quite far offshore, before we finally lost it in a flock. We saw it plunge several times however.

The next bird did the same thing. Not so easy and not so satisfying, although while at the north of the island, it visited some flocks which contained feeding roseate terns - useful to know where they are going.

We decided we needed some Sandwich tern data - most of them now have chicks on the island, but only the minority of common and Arctics have hatched their eggs. So we managed to follow one down to Druridge Bay, almost as far as the power station. We watched it fishing successfully - catching a couple for itself, before getting a large sandeel, and setting off for Coquet Island. It did a couple of swoops low to the water when it appeared to juggle the fish into a more secure position in its beak, then set off north. It motored, eventually climbing high and fast - too fast for us to keep up with, and we had to leave it to complete its journey unaccompanied. Great bit of data.

We took a short break in the lee of the island, where we could watch a few roseate terns bathing next to the island. Apparently they haven't hatched their eggs yet.

There are a lot of puffins nesting on the island, along with a few kittiwakes and probably a few guillemots and razorbills too. We saw someone wandering around in the tern colony (Laura the PhD student, as it turned out) wearing a rubber coat that was plastered in shite. Nice.

Puffins are so cute!

After the break, with the wind increased slightly, we decided to do a couple more legs of line transecting. We encountered a lot of feeding Sandwich terns in Druridge Bay - not far away from where we tracked the bird earlier in the day.

We finished the day by trying to track a Sandwich tern on the west side of the island - where we knew the wind would be calmer. We followed the bird right into Amble harbour and watched in make some plunge dives in the Coquet river. It then casually flew over the harbour wall to feed on the other side of the breakwater. Graeme declined to take the RIB over the harbour wall - I guess he'd need to get a bit of speed up. That was more than enough for one day.

More bad weather

2009-06-11T15:51:00.004+01:00

We thought we were going to get a reasonable day according to the inshore shipping forecast, but woke to full flags and lots of white caps on the sea. I tried to get hold of Graeme before he left Whitley Bay, but was too late. We went down to the Marina to have a chat after we'd got a more detailed weather forecast. The wind was set to drop down at midday, so we resolved to get in touch later.

It's a shame for him, because he has already arranged cover for himself at his business.

We go out later, after the wind has indeed dropped. But it's still a Beaufort force 4 out there. We begin some line transects, travelling south-east past the island (the same as the busy one yesterday, but in reverse). What a difference! We probably saw as many birds as the previous day, but they were feeding much further out from the island - in waters up to 50m deep about 15km from the island. And we saw fish being carried into the colony from these furthest points as well. We did one more leg before giving up on the weather. We were only able to do these transects because we had a following sea, and the remaining legs would have meant ploughing into the waves and not being able to see the terns and survey properly.

It was a tough few hours, but I'm so glad we went out; we would never have found out that the birds were travelling so much further to sea than the previous day.

Why did they do this? Is it because the weather is rougher?

Gratuitous shot of a Sandwich tern with a sandeel

More line transecting

2009-06-11T15:43:00.002+01:00

After another day blown out by NE force 4-5 winds on the Sunday, we ventured out again on the Monday to complete the line transecting legs. We picked up where we had finished off in Druridge Bay in pleasant Beaufort 3 winds.

Most of the legs were pretty quiet, but one leg, which went north-west past Coquet island was hooching with feeding birds. We seemed to meet feeding flock after feeding flock in an area up to 5km to the east and north-east of the island, and included 2-3 roseate terns to the north of the island. This was hard work, but we managed to cope with all the numbers.

Alas, there was a problem with the GPS, and we have had to go to other sources to reconstruct the track we followed. Moral: make sure we check the state of the batteries before starting each transect.

We had a bit of spare time available, so we tried to track some birds from the colony out to their feeding areas. Success! We managed to get up enought speed to follow two common and one Arctic tern out to their feeding grounds, and watch them feeding.

With the weather set to improve, and getting some reasonable data, we are feeling much more optimistic about what we're doing.

Champion!

Line transecting

2009-06-06T11:22:00.002+01:00

After a bit of hand-wringing and a chat to Linda back in Aberdeen, we concluded that we wouldn't be getting much work done if we wait for the weather to be good enough to chase birds.

Although not as useful as following adults to their feeding areas, we could at least do some line transecting. This is a standardised survey where you pinpoint all birds you see as your boat follows fixed lines. This should really be done from a bigger boat, but we had already decided that it would be perfectly valid to do this from a smaller boat, because nearly all of the birds we would see would be flying (I won't go into the details of the methodological considerations here). We would take the range and bearing to each bird, so we could pinpoint more accurately where they were actually feeding.

The previous day, I had plotted out a random route worked out by Linda. As always, it's important to put these onto an Admiralty chart to ensure the route doesn't take us over any rocks or other obstructions.

Although the route was a bit bumpy in places during the day (Seastate 2 or marginally higher at times), and wet in the rain, we managed to complete seven transects. We found it a bit challenging at first - the first line had a lot of birds on it for the first 10 minutes - and we struggled to identify birds and write down all the details onto wet data sheets. But we coped. I am conscious that without a good way to estimate distance, that this method is dependent on us measuring distances to birds accurately, or at least consistently.

The comforting thing about the day was that we saw few birds over waters deeper than 40 metres, and the two northern-most transects we followed were almost completely devoid of birds, apart from a couple of individuals transiting at the coast.

All told, we felt we had done something useful, and have found something that will keep us occupied while we wait for the weather to go calm enough for us to follow individual birds. However, with the wind forecast to increase again over the weekend, we will have to wait until we can get out to sea.

Chasing terns

2009-06-04T21:38:00.006+01:00

We went down to Amble Marina to meet up with Graeme and Dave, who had brought their RIB "Moby" from Beadnell Bay in a choppy sea. Kitted up in dry suits we ventured out into the North Sea to try out the survey methods.

I should explain what it is we're trying to do.

We need to design protected areas for five tern species around their most important nesting sites. There are too many important colonies in the UK to individually taylor a boundary around the most important feeding sites for each, so we are having to come up with some generic rules for where to put the boundaries, based on studies at a few key colonies. We've had some success with predicting where other seabird species feed based upon the habitats they use, and we want to use the same techniques on terns. We can look at the habitats used by terns by following nesting birds as they leave the colony and pinpoint the exact spots where they catch fish. If we can work out the habitats at each of these spots, we can build up a picture of the places they use, and the places we should protect, based upon the locations of their preferred habitats.

There are four teams doing this study this summer in Anglesey, Northern Ireland, Firth of Forth, and our team in Northumberland, concentrating our efforts at Coquet Island. This island is low and flat with abundant vegetation and lies about 1 mile off the coast near Amble. From a distance, it looks like an oil tanker, with the lighthouse appearing like the accommodation block on the ship. Large numbers of Sandwich, common, Arctic and roseate terns nest on the island.

Is it a ship? Is it a supertanker? No, it's a tern colony!

So how did we get on? Not very well. We sat in the RIB, bouncing about in quite a rough sea (seastate 3 - 4) until we could spot a Sandwich tern leaving the colony to travel in a direction where that would be smooth enough to follow it at speed. The first bird outstripped us easily, using the following wind. We tried with two more birds, but each time with Graeme taking the RIB as fast as he could, the Sandwich or Arctic tern gradually pulled ahead until it was lost from sight. We tried with an Arctic tern returning to the colony (upwind) and fared a bit better, but still lost the bird. We finished the day with following a couple of Sandwich terns that were actively searching. This was easier, as the birds were flying slower, but faced some extra problems with birds getting lost in a feeding flock.

"I can go faster than you!". Sammy the Sandwich tern

So we returned to the marina, feeling dispirited about what it would take to follow terns from the colony given the prevailing conditions at sea. We took a look at the weather forecast for the next few days, and realised that it was going to be a rare event when the sea would be calm enough for us to follow birds from the colony to their feeding areas.

The weather was forecast to be slightly worse the next day, so we cancelled Graeme for the day, so he could get on with other work.

Finding our feet in Amble

2009-06-02T21:37:00.006+01:00

Today we set out to get things going and make sure people knew we were about and starting work. In the morning we made a number of calls, and we negotiated internet access with a nearby guest house to use their WiFi (hence why I can write this blog).

We couldn't go out in the RIB today so went up the coast to Long Nanny where there is a National Trust wardened tern colony. At the car park, we bumped into a birder called Gary who seemed to have heard of us and the work we are going to be doing. He has a birding blog: http://newtonstringer.blogspot.com/

Posing Arctic tern

The tern colony is vast, with hundreds of pairs of Arctic terns and a small but growing number of little terns. We made contact with the wardens and found out how the season is progressing. We plan to return to the area later in the season to study the forgaging trips of the little terns and study their use of the sea. But the little terns have only recently started to lay eggs, and the first chicks won't start to be fed for another two weeks or so. The early indications are that the nesting season is a bit later. We watched as a carrion crow made repeated forays into the colony, accompanied by a swarm of furious Arctic terns, only to emerge seconds later with an egg in its beak. A volunteer warden was trying to pursue it with what looked like a high-tech catapult. But it was too wily and managed to keep its distance. I wonder how long before more drastic measures will be employed.

There seemed to be plenty of sandeels coming into the colony as display fish for the Arctic terns. I did see a gadid and a very young 0-group sandeel, so they aren't all bringing in grade-A display fish.

Arctic tern with grade-A display fish (sandeel)

We did some trial watches of the little terns, picking a spot a short distance away from the colony where we could try to watch them feeding from a high vantage point. The first thing we tried was to count the rate at which little terns passed in either direction. At first, all was quiet, then the final minutes of the watch were quite frantic. Out high vantage point proved difficult to be sure that we'd detected all flights. Most of the birds we saw uttered an occasional call to betray their presence. More interesting was when we spend half an hour watching individuals leaving the colony to see what they did. They all seemed to spend a bit of time at the mouth of the Long Nanny river, if they didn't get chased off by another bird if already present. They then flew fast northward toward Beadnell harbour, and starting to search for food at the same place each time. Often it proved difficult to follow an individual, because there seemed to be quite a bit of territorial behaviou - if a bird was already feeding at a particular spot, it wouldn't tolerate another bird encroaching on "its patch". We started to see a pattern by the end of the watch.

We returned to the car, did a shop in Alnwick on the way back to the house. Julie cooked a delicious meal (aubergine bake for the foodies out there). We were visited by Graeme, who will be driving the boat for us. It was good to meet him and just talk through what we want to do and make plans for our first attempts in the boat tomorrow. First impressions were good, and I hope he felt the same way about us. I think we're all a little apprehensive and at the same time excited by the work we'll be doing.

Off to Northumberland

2009-06-02T21:22:00.002+01:00

Thought it was about time I reinstated the blog. I had lots of good intentions about doing the blog to let people know about my new life in Old Portlethen (aka Portlethen Village), but never seemed to get around to doing this. Maybe I'll get the taste for blogging again.

After a lot of preparation - I have to admit mainly by others rather than me - we set off in my fully laden car from Aberdeen to Amble in Northumberland. It was a very pleasant drive on a hot sunny day. We used my Satnav to help find the ideal route from the A1 to Amble, which it surely did. Maybe we should have heeded the warning sign "Not suitable for through traffic". My fully laden car bumped its way down a rough track, with the continuous sound of weeds scraping my sills (sounds painful). Eventually we got back to a sensible road and to the house in Amble.

After unpacking the car then our bags, we went exploring. The house is 3 doors away from a superb fish and chip shop - The Harbour Chip Shop - very highly recommended, and would give Zanres or the Ashvale a run for their money.

We took our meal down to the harbour and watched Sandwich and common terns feeding in the evening light on the River Coquet. We heard the unmistakable "keewik" call of two roseate terns as one of them excitedly showed off its newly-caught sandeel to its mate.

Common tern in Amble

26 & 27 July - Saturday/Sunday

2008-07-27T08:16:00.010+01:00

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

25 July - Friday

2008-07-25T19:38:00.010+01:00

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!

24 July - Thursday part 1

2008-07-24T13:35:00.009+01:00

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

2008-07-24T12:57:00.005+01:00

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.

22 July - Tuesday

2008-07-22T20:16:00.006+01:00

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

2008-07-22T11:05:00.006+01:00

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.

19 July - Saturday 2

2008-07-20T16:38:00.008+01:00

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.

19 July - Saturday

2008-07-19T09:29:00.004+01:00

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.

18 July - Friday

2008-07-18T20:26:00.004+01:00

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

2008-07-18T05:33:00.001+01:00

GAN A 6 1 F 9 49 1

16 July - Wednesday

2008-07-18T05:32:00.001+01:00

Gannets

15 July - Wednesday

2008-07-16T14:15:00.002+01:00

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

14 July - Monday

2008-07-15T15:02:00.011+01:00

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.

13 July - Sunday

2008-07-14T10:05:00.012+01:00

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.

12 July - Saturday

2008-07-13T06:16:00.003+01:00

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.

11 July - Friday

2008-07-11T20:17:00.006+01:00

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!

10 July - Thursday part 3

2008-07-10T21:40:00.004+01:00

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

2008-07-10T10:40:00.002+01:00

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

2008-07-10T10:29:00.003+01:00

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?

9 July - Wednesday

2008-07-09T18:22:00.005+01:00

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.

8 July - Tuesday

2008-07-08T21:51:00.004+01:00

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.

7 July - Monday

2008-07-07T19:52:00.002+01:00

Mark and Adam did the first shift of the day for the point counts. So I got a lie in, although with all the clanking and banging and sound of engines (the bow thrusters if you're interested in that kind of thing) , it didn't feel much like a lie in.

At breakfast, a number of the physicists were coming off a long night shift. This consisted of various things, but mainly co-ordinating bringing a "profiler" that measures water turbulence up and down on a winch every five minutes. They were all tucking into lorry-driver size fry-up breakfasts. Quite impressive really.

I got off to a flyer - I couldn't find my binoculars anywhere and had to use the reserve pair we brought with us. I spent all of the morning fretting about where I might have left them, and daring not to think that someone might have pinched them. Of course, no such thing had happened, and I'd left them on a bench last night when knocking off.

We didn't see so much today - just four Cory's shearwaters and a single Manx. We saw some gannets feeding and searching. And that was about it. We finished surveying at 4 pm and brought ourselves up to date with coding up the data.

6 July - Sunday

2008-07-06T20:03:00.002+01:00

We had a slow start to the day, spent waiting for a number of checks and biological samples to be taken. We put it all to good use by bringing out blogs up to date!

The weather here is still pretty lousy with strong winds and plenty of showers. We eventually began our first stationary point counts at 2 pm - and need to keep these going every five minutes for the next 25 hours. On the way to the observation point, Mark sees a sooty shearwater - quite an early record for the autumn. It is in the late stages of wing moult; I don't recall seeing moult in a sooty shearwater before.

By the end of our first two hour session, we have seen 12 Cory's shearwaters, including some quite close to the ship. Mark is replaced by Adam, and we see at least as many again, including a group of six, scouring the surface in search of food. All of the birds we have seen well look like the Atlantic race borealis with no indication that any are Scopoli's. By the end of the day, we see a total of 46 Cory's. Superb!

5 July Saturday

2008-07-06T10:16:00.007+01:00

We decided the night before to wake at dawn to practice doing "point counts" at fixed stations. These are to be a new technique as far as seabird surveys at sea are concerned, and we needed to be sure that they would work.

The ship was like the Marie Celeste, just a sign saying that deploying of moorings (aka throwing expensive equipment over the side of the ship) was suspended because of 40 mph winds. This seemed a bit odd, so we looked outside. Sure enough, the sea was rather white with foam and spindrift. Time to go back to bed me thinks.

We spent the day computer coding our data and updating the data entry programs. I managed to lock myself out of my laptop computer after trying to get it to connect to the ship's network. I sent a rather plaintive email to our IT support to get the administrator password. I heard choirs of angels when I checked my email later - both Carl and Sue had responded with help on a Saturday. What stars!

The weather eased off a bit in the afternoon, at least enough for us to practice the point count survey methods. There were a lot of birds associated with the ship, and lots of stormies feeding. Our first glitch - they were all getting excited by the food waste being jettisoned from the galley. We'll have to try and do something about that, considering the point of these counts is to show how feeding behaviour changes at different states of the tide. Apart from that, the method seemed to be holding up.

The oceanographers managed to deploy another set of buoys with instruments attached, so we steamed slowly to the final station. We saw a couple more Cory's shearwaters - both seemed to be the Atlantic race - which raised the spirits. I went through a ridiculous comedy routine of trying to stick a plastic bag to the desk in our observation box with Duck tape. Every time I tore off a strip, the wind would blow the sticky parts together, rendering it useless for fixing the plastic bag to its intended location. Classic comedy it wasn't, but it amused the hell out of us.

4 July - Friday

2008-07-06T09:26:00.008+01:00

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.

3 July 2008

2008-07-04T16:04:00.005+01:00

I go to visit Martin Cade at Portland Bird Observatory to discuss data they hold on Balearic Shearwaters.

I get a phone call from the ship to say that the calibration work they are doing is going slowly. Beth Scott, who is in charge of collecting the fish data, and Clare Embling can't be enjoying this. The hopeful forecast for my transfer onto the ship are looking optimistic.

I take the hire car into Weymouth to drop it off at the depot, but not before I sneek a look at a Hooded Merganser that arrived at Radipole Lake in the town. It doesn't seem the best candidate for a wild vagrant from North America in this setting. The species was recently admitted to the British List, so unless someone comes along to reclaim his escaped Hooded Merganser, this one should be a kosher new species for me. I call a cab to take me back to the hotel - it turns out the driver is a keen birder.

I wait at the hotel in the afternoon for further news on the calibration work they are doing on the James Cook. I could see the ship off the Portland Harbour breakwaters. Mark phones to tell me that they have faced a number of technical difficulties, but that they will collect us at 8:30 pm whether they finish all the calibration or not. See Clare Emblings blog to learn more of their frustrations. I continue fiddling with the computer program for entering our seabird sightings data.

Eleanor and I are taken on a pilot's launch boat out to the waiting James Cook. The transfer goes smoothly, in spite of a choppy sea. I see a number of folks waiting on the ship's deck with cameras and I sense that one slip will be plastered across other blogs or appear on the Jeremy Beadle Show (that is if he weren't dead).

2 July 2008

2008-07-04T15:52:00.004+01:00

We could all get into our cabins and unpack our stuff. However, two of us have to go to meet the ship further along the coast at Portland because our cabins won't become available until others have finished their work on board (more of that later).

We get a full safety briefing, show our travel documents to the ship's pursor. After lunch I meet up with Russell Wynn, who is the co-ordinator for Seawatch-SW, which aims to collate records from shore-based seawatchers around the UK

After this, Eleanor Howlett and I drive around to Portland to check into our hotel rooms. She is a student from Liverpool University, attached to the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory there. The hotel (The Heights) is perched on the edge of Portland and overlooking Weymouth, Portland Harbour and Chesil Beach. The view is stunning and we were treated to a fantastic sunset.

Meanwhile, the James Cook has set sail from Southampton to begin calibration of the acoustic equipment used to detect fish and other matter underneath the ship.

1 July 2008

2008-07-04T15:09:00.008+01:00

I went down to the National Oceanographic Centre, where the James Cook is berthed. the dock-side and ship were a hive of activity with scientists unpacking equipment from crates, and stores being loaded for the duration of the cruise.

The observation boxes we had constructed were already on the foredeck and ready to be moved into their final position. These will hopefully provide reasonable shelter for us when out watching seabirds in all weathers. There are deflectors at the front which should keep the worst of the wind off us. There are nice doors on the side to allow us easy access - except someone put a fixing strap across them. So one of our jobs will to move those and tightend the bolts that hold the construction together.

The James Cook is a vast ship, just two years old

and very well equipped. It will be easily the most comfortable ship I've ever worked on, with individual cabins, high-speed internet access and a gym among many other facitilities. There will be three seabird and cetacean observers on board as part of a multi-disciplinary team to collect information on the physical and biological features of the Jones Bank in the Celtic Sea. The bank lies about 50 miles to the west of the Isles of Scilly and is known to have interesting tidal currents over it. We will be looking to see how these tidal currents bring nutrients to the surface and potentially enhance productivity and food supply for seabirds, whales and dolphins and other "top predators". Take a look at Clare Embling's blog for more detail.

Mark and I spent most of the morning helping with the box-lugging and familiarising ourselves with the ship. In the aftenoon we got remaining things we need for the cruise. In the evening we went for an excellent curry. I always have at the back of my mind "this could be my last ever curry so it better be a good one" before going to sea. Utterly ridiculous of course.

Now its really back 30 June 2008

2008-07-04T14:34:00.005+01:00

I've started this blog to let people know what's happening during the next 3 - 4 weeks I'm away from Aberdeen.

I started the day with a dispiriting meeting about SPAs with Defra, Scottish Govt and Welsh Assembly, and witnessed the mealy words used to dismiss the scientific advice they were offered.

Still there was always this photo from today's Press and Journal to cheer me up!

I am now joining a NERC cruise on board the RRS James Cook, and re-aquaint myself with some real science.

I drove to Southampton, listening to the commentary on the fantastic Andy Murray v Richard Gasquet tennis match. I joined the other scientists who were having a meal at a restaurant in town later. Seem a nice enough bunch.

It's back

2007-04-11T20:38:00.000Z

The blog is back! I'm not sure how easy it will be to do this, cos I doubt internet access is going to be so readily available.

Been in London for a couple of days before setting off and went to a show last night. It was a toss-up between "Wicked", which is a musical based on the story of the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West, and Porgy and Bess. Went for the latter it was the music, and a special offer what done it! Really enjoyed it so happy with the choice, although Wicked is getting rave reviews.

This followed a successful day's birding on Hampstead Heath. We enjoyed great views of a Green Woodpecker. We also Chiffchaff, Willow Warbler, Blackcap, Swallow and Wheatear which were handy early year-ticks.

Today we did some shopping, annoying security guards in Soho and had lunch at a South Indian veggie restaurant in Drummond St. Am now sitting in a hotel room in Crawley watching a programme about tigers being poached from reserves in India. Ian and Sue mentioned this after their recent trip. Still pretty shocking.

Off to the airport tomorrow and meet the rest of the folks. I still can't believe I'm going!

Ireland 43 England 13

2007-02-24T19:56:00.000Z

I just watched Ireland play us off the park at rugby. We can't even complain that the crowd was disrespectful at the new venue. We was well and truly gubbed!

USA Trip - day 20, 14th & 15th February

2007-02-16T00:14:00.000Z

Well, the return to Aberdeen went pretty smoothly. I returned the car OK and there were no unexpected surcharges. We checked in with United Airlines very efficiently, and went to have some breakfast.

Blogging at Asilomar

I phoned mum and dad to congratulate them on their wedding anniversary today. Ah, I hear you say, they got married on Valentine's Day! All's well at home, which is good to hear.

I then had one of those moments I realised something stupid I had done. I'd bought a nice bottle of wine to take back, and put it in my hand luggage. Of course, they are not allowing you to take unchecked liquids onto flights and there would be no alternative, but to surrender the bottle at security. Stoopid stoopid stoopid. The cleaner in the restaurant was very grateful for the free bottle of wine.

Well, so much for the sham of security. There was no exit scan of my fingerprints or my eyes. No customs to check on what I may have imported, and the only emigration control was done by the staff from United Airlines. Hmmm.

It was a long flight, in which the only relief from the child from hell came from in-flight movies. Any attempts by parents to control wayward child brought on ear splitting shrieks (similar in frequency and effect to a dentist's drill). I enjoyed The Prestige (Scarlet Wotsername), The Fastest Indian (Anthony Hopkins) and what I saw of Volver (Penelope Cruz).

We had a reasonably short turnaround at Heathrow, in which I had another "Stoopid Stoopid Stoopid" moment when I realised that we had to try and take the duty free we'd bought in San Francisco through security for the Aberdeen flight. This time, we felt there was too much to lose, so we wrapped the bottles in our coats and checked another bag into hold luggage. The pace seemed like 90mph at Heathrow. It didn't matter where I stepped or stood, someone seemed always to be rushing to get past me. Maybe I was dozy and jet-lagged, but I don't think so. The flight to Aberdeen had another child from hell. George's brother Stuart met us at the airport (which was freezing, especially with our outer coats in the hold luggage) and kindly took me home.

Everything was fine at home, no problems, and Ben and Hannah had kindly taken mail through to the kitchen. Jacko from next door brought round a box of wine which had been delivered while I was away. Something to quell the post-holiday blues.

USA trip, day 20 - 13th February

2007-02-14T06:10:00.000Z

I really don't want to leave here. There are deer grasing outside the room and a Dark-eyed Junco singing its heart out. Its so peaceful among the pines. I could easily get used to this.

Breakfasted, blogged then picked up Linda to return to San Francisco with a rather large detour via the Panoche Valley. We got there with assistance and occasional hindrance from Homer Simpson. The route there took us through rough chapparal habitat. We saw Nuttall's Woodpecker, Oak Titmouse, Spotted Towhee, Western and Mountain Bluebirds and Yellow-billed Magpie, among plenty of other birds. Possibly the best thing we saw was a pair of Acorn Woodpeckers next to their store tree. The bark was riddled with hundreds of holes, most of which had a single acorn inside. The woodpeckers were busy tending their harvest and adding new acorns to the stash.

The Panoche Valley proper was a flat plain with dry rough grassland, and apparently home to a substantial flock of Mountain Plovers. They are supposed to be here all winter, but the last report was back in December. We tried this and a number of potential places with no luck. There were numerous Savannah Sparrows all along the fence lines, acting for all the world like Meadow Pipits. Say's Phoebe seemed to be reasonably common too. We saw a cracking Golden Eagle next to the road which took off and flew over our heads. This signalled the time to break off and head up to San Francisco.

We dropped Linda off at her hotel, but not before I drove the wrong way up a one-way street. Oops. Actually, I was surprised by how the chaos I caused seemed to cause so little animosity. We checked into a Holiday Inn near Fisherman's Wharf, found an Italian Restaurant for a meal, then watched a film (Black Dahlia).

USA trip, day 19 - 12th February

2007-02-13T17:13:00.000Z

After breakfast, went to The Nature Conservancy’s check-in to see if Malcolm Hodges was attending the conference. One of the women knew Mal, but confirmed he wouldn’t be coming. Oh well, worth a try. While blogging, I was sat near to one of their directors (D Robertson - I read it on his name badge) who was having loud phone conversations with members of the board, coaching their contribution to the next board meeting.

We took a slow drive down the coast, through Carmel (stopping at a couple of birding sites) eventually to Big Sur. We went for a walk in the Andrew Molera State Park, getting as far as the beach, but unable to reach it to walk on. The main interest here was hummingbirds. We saw a glorious male Allen’s Hummingbird which must have just arrived, and a Anna’s Hummingbird which was doing it’s huge J-shaped display flight. Repeatedly, it flew vertically into the air, like a Harrier jet, then plummeted downward before curving round and upwards, giving a short “peep” call at the bottom of the “J”. I don’t know how they find enough energy to live at this time of year, let alone do this display flight sequence.

The woods were full of wintering warblers, mainly Yellow-rumped with a few Townsend’s and lots of Ruby-crowned Kinglets. Other additions to the trip list here were California Towhee, American Robin and some Wrentits.

This stretch of coast is famed for its scenery. Almost as beautiful as the west coast of Scotland I’d say. There are a lot of big, exclusive houses with “fuck off” signs posted all around. We drove through Carmel, expecting to see Clint Eastwood wandering about town. It was full of large houses with ocean views and lots of artistic shops. The paintings on offer in art shops are a bit in your face for my liking. There didn’t seem to be anything subtle in the way of artistic expression.

On the beach at Carmel, an excessively blonde woman was having her photos taken by a dirty old man. She was getting into it, pulling pose after pose for the camera. I don’t know who was getting what out of this photo shoot, but I guess it is to be expected in a part of the world where appearance is everything.

We got back to our sanctuary at Asilomar in the late afternoon. I’m sitting here writing this on the balcony of the room in fading light, listening to the ocean waves washing over the beach. The only thing missing right now is a large gin and tonic.

Had an excellent meal at a restaurant called The Fishwife. Excellent food, and a waitress who certainly knew how to describe the food in a gravely east coast accent.

USA trip, day 18 - 11th February

2007-02-12T17:06:00.000Z

We got up frighteningly early to go down to Monterey fish dock to join an all-day pelagic trip. Monterey Bay contains a deep underwater canyon, which means cetaceans and seabirds typical of these very deep waters pass close inshore. A whole industry has sprung up around showing these to the public. Our trip was a specialist seabirding trip, so leaders were throwing bits of anchovy and popcorn overboard to attract a big gull flock, and hopefully other goodies. There were a few folks from the conference on the trip, including some of the leaders, mixed with some birders, including some Brits.

It was quite a good trip in the end, although a long day battling against the swell and movement of the boat. There were a few folks making their own contribution to the food going over the side for the gulls. I saw two new cetacean species – Grey Whale and beautiful Dall’s Porpoise along with Risso’s Dolphins, a lonely White-sided Dolphin and a Humpback Whale at the end. Of the seabirds, Short-tailed Shearwater, Pink-footed Shearwater and Thayer’s Gull were new for me, and there were also lots of Common Murres/Guillemots, Kittiwakes, Ancient Murrelets, Rhinocerous Auklets, a few Sooty Shearwaters and Black-footed Albatross. One of the albatrosses was ringed. Such is the power of modern digital photography, within minutes, Steve Howell got a photo, blew it up to zoom right in on the ring, and the details logged of the bird, probably ringed as a chick about 20 years ago on Tern Island in the mid-Pacific. A lot of these guys use digital SLR cameras with about 300 – 400mm lenses with image stabilisation. They then fire off about 10 shots in a rapid burst, and pick one or two of these, deleting the others.

I spoke a bit to Peter Pyle, who co-ordinates the at sea surveys for US Fish and Wildlife. He was sufficiently impressed with my talk that he’s considering changing their whole programme to adopt these standards. I think it was their group I felt had furthest to go to catch up with other groups. Maybe standardisation here is not going to be such a big effort.

Sandy Bartle and Peter Pyle

After getting off the boat, George and Linda wanted to do a bit of present shopping. I scanned around the harbour and managed to pick out two Harlequin Ducks we’d been looking for, without success, from the boat. They were a pair, and the adult male was a wee beauty, like a small child had been given a full palette of paints to colour in a drawing. A Townsend’s Warbler flew into a tree in the parking lot to seal off a really good day.

When we got back to Asilomar, there was another conference checking in from the American Nature Conservancy. I wonder if Malcolm Hodges is at the conference. Fell asleep within minutes of getting back to the room in spite of a beautiful sunset.

USA trip, day 17 - 10th February

2007-02-12T17:02:00.000Z

Mike Harris did this morning’s one-hour plenary session on “Common Murres” and proceeded to spend much of his time struggling not to call them Guillemots. As ever, Mike was lucid and interesting to listen to, his slides easy and quick to understand. During the talk, Rik texted me to inform me of the final score in which Scotland beat Wales in the rugby (Mike is an avid Wales rugby fan – in his vast collection and library of bird books at home is one non-bird book – Barry John’s autobiography).

After this, I took a bit of a break and did some birding with George along the shore towards Point Pinos. One of the first things we saw was a Belted Kingfisher among the rock pools. In the bays were a few Sea Otters, some wrapping themselves in kelp so they didn’t drift away while trying to sleep. They are the cutest creatures on earth, and possibly they know it. There were some Western Sandpipers feeding along the shoreline. I tried to have a go at separating them all from Semipalmated Sandpiper, to which they are almost identical. Not easy, as they seemed to lack the fine breast streaks typical of this species at this time of year. I could just about see that the bill tips were too fine for the latter species though. Just offshore were a couple of winter adult Rhinocerous Auklets. Difficult to see, but the bill was too long to be Cassin’s Auklet, and also the latter species suffered a huge crash in the last couple of years, so is very difficult to see in their typically offshore habitat. On the way back to the room at Asilomar, we saw a Hermit Thrush next to the road.

After lunch, I went to a few more talks and got chatting to Doug Forsell, who was one of the original Alaska seabirds-at-sea crew. He’s nearing retirement and wants to sell the house, buy a boat and use it to travel the world. I can understand that. It chucked it down with rain in the afternoon.
There was a Mexican banquet in the evening, which served great food, followed by awards for best student talk and poster and two awards – one for outstanding achievement to Ed Melvin, who has done so much work to get fishermen to change their practices to stop mortality of seabirds in gill nets, and now doing the same thing for longline fishing. Quite humbling really. The lifetime achievement award went to Mike Harris. Overall, the whole awards thing went on a bit long as rather too many people seemed to want to get in on the act. As soon as this was over, the tables were cleared and a latino band played some great music, and lots of people were up dancing. What an excellent end to the conference.

USA trip, day 16 - 9th February

2007-02-12T16:51:00.000Z

I skipped the plenary session today. It was a public debate between two persons who sit on the opposite side of the fence on whether Brown Pelicans should be declassified as an endangered species. This was experimental as something to do at a PSG conference. Nobody seemed to be talking about it afterwards, so I wonder if it worked out OK.

I did some emailing etc and went through my talk again. Going back to the meeting rooms, I hit a bit of a purple patch with the local birds. This included Bushtits (just like Long-tailed Tits back home), a Downy Woodpecker, Chestnut-backed Chickadees, a Pine Siskin, a couple of Western Scrub Jays and a target species for me, Townsends Warbler! There was also a Say's Phoebe in the grounds, though it didn't look much like the book illustrations.

My talk went well, although if I'd had 20 minutes, I'd have missed out fewer important facts. Linda's talk went well, and attracted quite a bit of interest. She was nervous, although I only knew because she told me so.

At the end of the final session on "seabirds at sea" methods, there was a spontanious discussion about survey methods from ships. There are a lot of different methods being used in the Pacific, and while people want to standardise, they are reluctant to let go of their old methods. We're so lucky to have standardised our methods in Europe before too many projects started.

It's strange at these conferences. Once you've given a talk to a group you don't know well, all the doors suddenly open. I guess its a bit like an "ice-breaker".

George spent the day in Monterey, including a morning at the aquarium. It sounds a truly amazing place.

USA trip, day 15 - 7th February

2007-02-09T17:30:00.000Z

The conference started full swing. After introductions, there was a plenary session from Henri Weimerskirch which was an intense presentation of data comparing forganing strategies of seabird species between the tropics and temperate zones. It was a bit of a shock for me to go from thinking about edging skis to lots of detailed technical information. His was one of a number of papers describing sexy work derived from attachments of data loggers, satellite tags and other gizmos. One speaker in the session questioned how many people are doing the basics of checking the impacts of the devices on the seabirds themselves. Not many is the unfortunate answer.

I got to see a bit of the grounds and took a look at the beach (George had taken a walk along the beach during the day). There were a few waders on the rocks, including Surfbirds, Black Turnstone, Glaucous-winged Gull. The grounds had a number of Acorn Woodpeckers flying about, squawking like parakeets. Some deer, presumably Mule Deer, which seemed very tame, and a Red-shouldered Hawk which seemed oblivious to people watching it, perhaps enjoying the attention.

I didn’t join the social events in the evening, and instead went through my talk a couple of times in preparation for tomorrow.

USA trip, day 14 - 6th February

2007-02-09T17:25:00.000Z

We got up to the shock of wet roads and pavements. Does that mean it’s been snowing in the High Sierras? We were too late after dawn for Burrowing Owls, so gave them a miss (sorry Nancy).

We drove around the Yolo farmlands looking at the many birds of prey perched on telegraph posts or hunting over fields. These were White-tailed Kites, Red-tailed Hawks and American Kestrels with the bonus of a Cooper’s Hawk. We went to the spot where apparently Mountain Plovers occur regularly each winter. After searching lots of ploughed fields we gave up. The only other species of interest were a couple of Golden-crowned Sparrows, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet (without a ruby crown) and some Yellow-billed Magpies.

At midday, we broke off to drive into San Francisco where we were to meet Linda Wilson, a work colleague who is also going to the Pacific Seabird Group Annual Meeting. We found ourselves ahead of schedule for our rendezvous time, so made a quick stop near Oakland Marina to look at birds in San Francisco Bay. There were some birds of interest there, including Clark’s Grebe, Slavonian (Horned) Grebe, Greater Scaup, Forster’s Tern, American Wigeon, Bufflehead and Redhead.

We picked up Linda from her hotel near Union Square, and drove down Highway 1 to Monterey. It drizzled for most of the journey south, but in spite of that, the coastline was beautiful. We also drove past a number of sites we birded in during our last visit to the region in 2003 (or was it 2002?). We arrived at the conference centre at Asilomar, which is on the headland to the west of Monterey. It consists of a number of timber buildings all set in grounds with Monterey Pines set back from a beach. The layout was a b it confusing in the dark, but we managed to find where we went for the evening meal, and to catch a coach for an evening social at world-famous Monterey Aquarium.

This was a great venue for a social event. There are a number of imaginatively presented tanks containing various fish and jellyfish. The jellies, in particular, were beautifully illuminated to bring out the beauty of these creatures. Pride of place went to a huge tank with Yellow-finned Tuna, Hammerhead Sharks and Ocean Sunfish. I kept looking at a join in the glass and hoped it wouldn’t suddenly burst open, I’m sure the fish would have been thinking the same thing.

USA trip, day 14 - 6th February

2007-02-07T16:13:00.000Z

After checking out from the Montbleu, we set off at 10:30 to drive to Sacramento through the beautifully scenic Sierra Mountains. About 2 hours later, we arrived at the Vic Fazio Yollo Wetland Preserve, adjacent to the Interstate 80 Sacramento by-pass. This is a huge restored wetland created from flooded farmland. Most of the preserve is available to hunters during part of the winter, but that season had now finished. Visitors can drive around a gravel track around a small part of the site at any time of year.

This place was fantastic with tens of thousands of waterfowl, mainly American Coots, Northern Pintail, Northern Shoveler, Ruddy Ducks, Buffleheads, Cinnamon Teal and Green-winged Teal. We notched up a reasonable list of species during the afternoon, and I won’t bore people with a full list. The key species we saw were American Bittern (cracking close views – the book describes them as ponderous, but I’d say that conveys too much urgency); a stunning Red-shouldered Hawk which seemed oblivious to us watching it from the car; several Violet Green Swallows; two Golden-crowned Sparrows among the many White-crowned, Savannah and Song Sparrows; American Pipits; Greater Yellowlegs; American White Pelican; Tricolored Blackbird; several Northern Harriers hunting incredibly close to the track; Black Phoebes and Yellow-rumped Warblers (“Budder-burts”) everywhere. The reserve is renowned for its wintering geese, but t-shirt weather for us meant geese wintering further north.

As the sun started to set and we made our way out of the reserve (we could easily have spent a lot longer there), swarms of Brewers Blackbirds were streaming across the wetland, obviously to some huge, no doubt very noisy and smelly mass roost. It was an awesome sight.

We went into Davis to find a motel. We ate at the Caffe Italia. Several times during this trip, I have thought of American friends and birds I have seen with them, or places I know they have visited. UC Davis is where Nancy Harrison studied for her Doctorate. I remember her telling me about nearby Burrowing Owls, and I hope to see them tomorrow morning in the Yolo farmlands.

USA trip, day 13 - 5th February

2007-02-05T21:56:00.000Z

Our final day of skiing. Not quite perfect blue skies, but still plenty of sun. We got to the lift reasonably early again, seeing some Steller's Jays from the car on the way.

It's a testament to Heavenly, that most of the pistes are looking good. They've been making snow overnight here (from their own reservoirs) and grooming the slopes ready for the next morning. They've had to close off more of the expert skier slopes through lack of snow. We slowed down on the skiing mid morning as the spring conditions turned snow to slush, and gave up by midday.

What do I think of skiing at Heavenly? I think it's great, and I know that a lot of the resorts around here have suffered far more from the warm and dry conditions. It would have been good to have had more difficult trails to progress to, but that wasn't possible. I'd like to come back, and I'd stay at the Montbleu again.

We took our skis back to George's Ski Hire. I was a bit concerned because I'd gone over a few unmarked rocks and scratched the underside of the skis quite badly in places. No problem at all. Compare this to Banff, where they have charged me before now for leaving small scratches on skis. So full marks to George's Ski Hire for their excellent service.

We're busy packing this afternoon, ready to set off tomorrow. We'll probably eat in Heavenly Village tonight. The plan is to go to some of the wetlands and farmlands around Sacramento tomorrow, where we hope to see a lot of geese, birds of prey, and who knows maybe some wintering Mountain Plovers. Pleeeeze!

George has been farting non-stop since we got back - no idea what he's been eating. Went down to the swimming pool and hot tub (maybe George could come in use there) to relax before going out. A woman came up to us and asked if George and I were twins. WHAT ??!!

USA trip, day 12 - 4th February

2007-02-04T23:55:00.000Z

Had a great meal at the hotel's main restaurant Ciero. Not cheap, but great food.
Got to the slopes early this morning, and it was well worth the effort. The chairlifts from the Nevada side start earlier than those from California side, so we managed to get to some of the better trails before the crowds arrived. The pistes were nice and smooth and we could throw ourselves about and get some speed up. Fab. After 10 a.m , we took a break, did a couple of runs, then a rather long break. It was really warm today and people were basking in the sunshine in t-shirts.

Skied a bit more, but the snow was turning into slush in places, and there were a lot of nasty ice patches to negotiate, so we returned to base and went back to the hotel.

We decided to go to find a Superbowl party. There's a big sports bar here, so we figured this is where it would be at. What a disappointment, there were a few folks watching the big screens, but they were playing poker on machines on the bartop at the same time. George mentioned how rarely he'd heard anyone swearing after deciding to go back to the room. Later, a few Chicago Bears fans came to the bar, and they made up for the lack of swearing we'd heard so far. One guy (who could get a part-time job as a fog horn if need be) kept yelling at the Chicago quarterback "You Suck", sounding more like something out of Beavis and Butthead (without the laugh). After the game was over I returned to the room past a stream of disgruntled Chicago fans streaming from the theatre where you could hear lots of cheering Indianapolis fans - so that's where the party was!

USA trip, day 11 - 3rd February

2007-02-04T03:31:00.000Z

Clear blue skies again! George thinks a Blog is something you would find up your nose.

We did the usual ski runs, and being the weekend, the slopes were very crowded and soon got icy. One of the small pleasures of skiing is sharing a chair lift with other skiers and riders. Sometimes it's difficult to get more than a grunt out of your fellow passengers, but others can be quite chatty. A guy today had been to the island of Islay a couple of years ago and had sampled and clearly enjoyed a lot of the whiskies there. He had left his two children at the ski school for the day so was now off the leash and going skiing in all the places he enjoyed.

We stopped again again at midday and went birding in the afternoon. Rik kindly texted through the score from the Calcutta Cup - how sweet to avenge our defeat of last year. It's the day before the Superbowl and that's all you hear about at the moment.

We went to somewhere called Fallen Leaf Lake in the afternoon. We'd tried and failed to find it in fading light on our day off. It was worth the walk and beautiful. We saw a small family party of Oregon Juncos and I pished in some cracking Red-breasted Nuthatches - it's remarkable how birds in N. America respond to this noise. The nuthatch sat on an exposed branch, calling just like a Zebra Finch at me and tapping on the wood.

The weather forecast tonight said the weather system is going to break down and allow snow showers though to the Sierra Nevada, and probably high winds on the coast - that threaten the pelagic birding trip we've booked out of Monterey next Sunday.

USA trip, day 10 - 2nd February

2007-02-03T05:15:00.000Z

Once more we woke to clear blue skies. I strapped up my wrist and we headed for the slopes.

We did our favourite runs and again did the Little Dipper black run. They have been making snow here and the moguls (bumps) are getting higher, and more difficult to negotiate. Also, some of the better trails are starting to wear a bit thin in places; a symptom of the sunny days we're experiencing here. Also, a lot of the trails are icy, as the groomed surface gets scraped off during the day.

A lot of the trails here are closed - mostly blacks and double blacks - on account of the poor snow cover. The main trails still open are only being kept open thanks to the snow-making facilities here. But even these are deteriorating. All of the west coast USA ski resorts have been hit in the same way - a high pressure and low pressure system are blocking storms off from the Pacific. Instead, these storms are hitting further north and giving resorts, such as Whistler in Canadian, record snow falls. Virtually no snow has fallen around Tahoe this year.

After a leisurely lunch and pint at the base lodge, we returned to the hotel early, and took a look around the Heavenly resort near the hotel. Not much to say, except that the shops here are a bit more upmarket, whereas the others on the California side seem only to sell trashy tourist tat and t-shirts.

The film for tonight was The Return, featuring Sarah Michelle-Gellar. OK.

USA trip, day 9 - 1st February

2007-02-03T05:10:00.000Z

We both seem to have shaken off our bug. Woke again to yet another perfect blue sky. We skied most of the resort today and did the Little Dipper mogul field twice – I fell properly today on one of those runs, then again when I lost concentration in an icy area on one of the moderate difficulty trails. It wasn’t until later I realised I sprained my wrist during the fall – bloody sore! And any comments referring to my sex life will be edited! We had lunch at a restaurant that overlooks the Gunbarrel trail and Lake Tahoe – pretty spectacular!

We did a bit more shopping – George to get some Van Heusen shirts at ridiculously cheap prices, and me to get a supporting bandage for my wrist.

This evening’s film was A Good Year with Albert Finney and Russell Crowe – worth seeing.

USA trip, day 8 - 31st January

2007-02-03T05:04:00.000Z

Another day of clear blue skies and there is still no new snow to replenish the pistes. George had a bad night, complaining of breathlessness – sounds familiar. I’m feeling a bit better today. Not much to say about the skiing, except that we did the fully fledged mogul field of Little Dipper, again somewhat gracelessly. We both fell today. Mine was more of a topple, and George lost his ski edge on an ice sheet at the end of the day. It had to happen sooner or later.

We watched The Illusionist for our film this evening – quite entertaining.

USA trip, day 7 - 30th January

2007-02-03T05:00:00.000Z

We decided to take a day off. I was feeling off colour again (over the last couple of days, I’ve found myself gasping for breath – I’m pretty sure I picked up a chest infection from the guy sat next to me on the plane from Chicago). The lift passes for the ski areas only cover 10 of the 11 days we’re here; more cloud is forecast for today, so we might as well make it today. Amazingly, neither of us has fallen over when skiing, yet.

We drove a short distance around the lake, and away from the sprawl of South Lake Tahoe. It takes forever to drive from one end of town to the other, and is an appalling example of unregulated development in a beauty spot. I guess we can start to look forward to this if, as promised, the UK government opts to relax planning restrictions in greenbelt areas.

We parked the car off the main road near a recreational area called Baldwin Beach, and walked through the trees to the lake shore. In one area, where I could here a distant bird flock, I managed to pish in a considerable flock of birds. It was made up mostly of Pygmy Nuthatches, a couple of Down Woodpeckers, Mountain Chickadees, a Bewick’s Wren, Bushtits and I could hear, but not see, a Red-breasted Nuthatch.

The lake shore was deserted of people and beautiful in the calm cloudless sky (so much for the weather forecast). I had hoped to see Bald Eagles, which congregate near here in winter apparently, but had no luck. We did see a beautiful drake Hooded Merganser on the lake, along with Buffleheads, a couple of Common Goldeneyes, and the inevitable California Gulls.

After this, we went to a small shopping mall full of factory outlets. There were some real bargains there, especially with the pound so strong against the dollar. We returned via a supermarket – it doesn’t matter where I am in the world, I love to see the food that people buy. However, we were there for much more important reasons – our gin stocks were getting dangerously low back in the hotel room.

George was feeling under the weather in the evening, so I got a meal to go for the room, and we watched a subscription film again – Infamous. It had an interesting cast, including excellent performance from Toby Jones (as Truman Capote), Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig and Juliet Stephenson. The trailer hailed Gwyneth Paltrow as one of the leading actors, yet she sang a song at the beginning (admittedly very well) and that’s all. This was an excellent film, but it doesn’t seem to have got any Oscar nominations. Perhaps Capote’s success last year screwed things up for Infamous.

USA trip, day 6 - 29th January

2007-02-03T04:36:00.000Z

Today, it was back to brilliant sunshine. We started out from the Stagecoach Lodge which we could also reach by car. The chair-lift is a bit faster here than at Boulder, and allowed us to get to our favourite run, Olympic, in double quick time.

It’s a strange thing skiing; today, in the brilliant sunshine, I felt as if I couldn’t do a thing wrong. I was concentrating on tipping my skis over as far as I dared as I made turns. The new shaped skis (or carvers as they are known) allow you to turn the skis by using their broad tips and narrow waist and pressure from the feet. The faster you go, the more you need to tilt your skis on their edges. When you get it right, you experience a fantastic feeling of accelerating out of each turn and this is known as carving. Inexperienced skiers tend not to edge their skis much, and slide around turns as their skis lose grip. People who are proficient at carving leave perfectly parallel crisp tracks on the snow and seem to expend the minimum of effort in a beautiful rhythmic dance down the slope.

The freezing fog from yesterday left the trees coated in a beautiful white frost, which melted slowly through the day. The birds seem quite active today. I have seen Clark’s Nutcracker just about every day, and heard Mountain Chickadee too. Today, they seemed to be everywhere. Its noticeable here that the Clark’s Nutcrackers and chickadees don’t seem to hang around the eateries on the mountain, compared to the ski areas around Banff in Canada, where they take food off peoples’ plates. Here they seem to feed naturally. Apart from a pair of Ravens, we’ve seen nothing else. So much for my hope of running into a Williamson’s Sapsucker, which ought to be present. Perhaps they descend to lower altitudes in winter?

We skied all over the mountain, including down to California Lodge which involved negotiating some areas where the snow was running bare. A lot of people were coming down a trail called the Gunbarrel, which is a long, steep and bumpy “double black” run that’s way beyond my capabilities. Some were wearing t-shirts only on top, a sign of how mild it gets at midday.

Back in the hotel room, I flicked through endless crap TV channels. One show, hosted by local ski personality Glen Plake (distinctive for his foot-high multi-coloured mohican hairstyle), was definitely made on a tight budget. The show featured all kinds of drossy ski and snowboard video clips. Though interestingly, he showed some footage from last winter's “Gunbarrel Challenge”, in which hundreds of contestants try to negotiate the Gunbarrel Trail above California Lodge 25 times in the shortest possible time. They must have thighs of steel. The close of his show was a group of punters in a bar somewhere in SoLaTa (work it out) whooping at video clips of people having terrible ski/snowboard accidents. The more horrendous the accident, the louder they whooped and that decided the eventual winning “accident”.

USA trip, day 5 - 28th January

2007-02-03T04:08:00.000Z

It was overcast, breezy with a lot of wind-chill. We again used Boulder Lodge as our start (and finish) point. I was feeling off colour and with the weather conditions, not enjoying my skiing. It’s strange, but you get days when you don’t feel you can do anything right, and this was one of those days for me. Because it was overcast, I found it difficult to pick my line on the slopes, because I was feeling off colour, my technique was going to pot. George seemed to be bombing along just fine. Unfortunately, the Olympic run wasn’t open today to bolster my fragile confidence.

We took refuge in one of the mountain lodges where lots of people had the same idea. We were joined at our table by a couple from Glasgow and another couple from Michigan. We had an interesting chat – the couple from Michigan were apologising for George Bush, and the woman from Glasgow admitted that she’d had a couple of “off days” too. They answered the mystery of the beads in the trees. Apparently it stems from New Orleans Mardi Gras, where participants in the parade throw these beads into the watching crowds. These beads appear in all kinds of unexpected places across the country to advertise the event. They couldn’t help explain the bra in the tree however, although the woman from Michigan did say how much she’d enjoyed going to Mardi Gras when she was a young single woman.

We gave up early in the afternoon. The wind was getting up a bit more and blowing freezing fog onto the trees. This didn’t do much for the visibility, and it was pretty cold on the slower chair-lifts too.

We used the swimming pool in the hotel which is nicely landscaped around huge rock formations, complete with a waterfall and a (very) hot tub. Had cocktails in the bar, then went to the buffet again.

Casino hall at the Montbleu

USA trip, day 4 - 27th January

2007-02-02T08:12:00.000Z

A view over South Lake Tahoe - Mont Bleu is the big building furthest to the right.

We drove to the Boulder Resort in Nevada this morning where we took slow chairs up the hill. We eventually found our way to the Olympic trail which is a beautifully groomed piste, and was a great place to practice carved turns. We did a black diamond run (one of the few that’s open) called Little Dipper which is slightly bumpy, steepish and icy. We survived, although this won’t go down as one of the most elegant executions of this run.

In general, we’ve found the blue runs at Heavenly to be pretty straightforward and well within the capability of all except beginners. Compare this to Lake Louise in Canada, where blue runs are much tougher; often steep, icy and occasionally even with moguls.

We’ve been noticing that some of the trees next to the chairlifts are adorned with coloured shiny beads, mostly silver and purple in colour. What’s that all about? One of the trees also had a bra in the trees; WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT?

It got quite crowded by late morning, the piste became quite churned up, so we went back to the quieter Boulder area where we could enjoy our skiing more.

After a “eat all you can” buffet supper at the hotel ($20 each at weekend, cheaper during the week), we watched a movie in the room – SAW III – a nice piece of family viewing to help you get off to sleep!

USA Trip , day 3 - 26th January

2007-01-31T07:08:00.000Z

Woke at 4 a.m. and tried to get back to sleep. Gave up at 7 and went for a full breakfast in the hotel. We kitted up - first mistake of the trip - trying to put on ski boots on a full stomach at altitude. We waited an age for the complimentary bus to arrive, which then took us around the other casinos and finally deposited us at the base of the gondola about an hour after we got to the bus stop. We picked up our ski passes (pre-ordered through Ski-I, who also booked our accommodation) with no fuss and took the gondola up to the Heavenly ski area. The views from the gondola over Lake Tahoe were truly spectacular. Some reporters express disappointment at the way the casinos spoil the view from here. To be honest, they're only marginally worse than the rest of South Lake Tahoe.

We chose a nice easy green run to get ourselves into the groove, which went pretty well, then took a blue run down to Sky Deck area then up to the highest point of the mountain. As blue (intermediate) runs go, these were pretty flattering, and we had a very pleasant ski down the Ridge Run. The views over Lake Tahoe from this high point were stunning. Similarly, the views in the other direction over the plains of Nevada were pretty good too.

Today is Australia Day, and it became pretty clear that a high proportion of the staff in the ski resort hail from those parts. Those not working were having a party on the slopes – lots of green and gold, including helium balloons, lots of noise and by the looks of things, lots of booze.

We were pretty knackered by the middle of the afternoon, so returned to the California side, and took the gondola down to the "village". The bus back to the hotel was pretty efficient, but we resolved to use the jeep next day.

We wandered around the town to try and find somewhere to eat - easier said than done - you need to drive to sample the full range of restaurants. We ended up at Kalanis - and enjoyed some excellent Japanese fusion cuisine. The restaruant was full of families, all in town for the weekend.

USA Trip , day 2 - 25th January

2007-01-31T06:59:00.000Z

Next morning we took a walk around Fisherman’s Wharf. San Francisco was enveloped in low cloud (typically), but it was good to see the (California) Sea Lions at Pier 39, performing well. There was not much happening on the birding front, although I didn’t expect to see some Anna’s Hummingbirds buzzing around one of the car parks. There were quite a few Mew Gulls (aka Common Gulls) around the harbour, which weren’t present during my last visit in the summer.

We checked out and started our drive to Lake Tahoe. We took a route via the Golden Gate Bridge (well you have to don’t you) and took a road across the northern part of San Francisco Bay. There were a number of pools and estuarine parts we couldn’t get access to – frustrating as these seemed very birdy. We did manage a stop and a little walkabout a freshwater pool where 100’s of Brewer’s Blackbirds were following a tractor ploughing a field, with 10’s of Ring-billed Gulls. There were plenty of diving ducks there, including Canvasback, Lesser Scaup, Redhead, Ruddy Duck, Bufflehead, Pintail, American Coot, and a small flock of Least Sandpipers and a lone Willet feeding around the edge. A Northern Harrier and a White-tailed Kite were quartering the saltmarsh.

After a quick stop for lunch, we continued our journey. It was pretty mild, with temperatures in the mid 60’s Fahrenheit once we got away from the coastal fog. The drive was pretty easy past Sacramento, then we wound our way through the Sierra mountains and down to Lake Tahoe, and our destination of South Lake Tahoe.

This town has a split personality because it straddles the state-line between California and Nevada. On the California side is a long boulevard with a sprawling mess of budget motels and eateries. I'm sure there is some good quality accommodation among this dross, but you'd have to know what you're looking for. Around the base of a new gondola to the ski areas up the mountain, new developments have added a touch of class to the area. Across the state-line there are a number of casinos modelled on Las Vegas and Reno.

We are staying in one of these, the Mont Bleu Resort, which used to be Caesars (as in Caesars Palace). The rooms are very comfortable here on the 9th floor (another 7 floors above us) with a great view of the mountains behind South Lake Tahoe. The basement is taken over by a huge games hall – slot machines, slot poker games, card and roulette tables. It’s very glitzy, as you would expect and another world to a non-gambler. Also on the ground floor are a swimming pool, spa, fitness centre, 3 bars (with gaming machines on the bar), 7 restaurants, a nightclub, a concert hall and several shops. It’s some place, and very good value.

A welcome letter from Ben, our rep from Ski-I was waiting for us, complete with instructions for picking up our lift pass tomorrow. The local ski slopes have been suffering from a lack of snow - apparently the worst ski conditions for 20 years. Oh dear.

We went out to look for skis to hire, and found that the rental shops further away from the casinos offered very good value for money. We settled on George’s Ski Rental which offered top of the range at $20 per day with a discount voucher I printed out from their web site and a considerable saving on other places we checked out. We ate in one of the Mont Bleu restaurants and crashed out.

USA Trip , day 1 - 24th January

2007-01-31T06:56:00.000Z

George and I left Aberdeen 2 ½ hours late on 24th January – a few flecks of snow apparently brought Heathrow to a stand-still as numerous aircraft competed for de-icer. This meant the plane which we were due to catch was late in getting to Aberdeen. So, we missed our connecting flight to San Francisco and the only alternative meant a journey via Chicago and arriving at our destination 6 hours later than planned.

This was the first time I have been into USA since the new security system came into force. You still have to answer the same stupid questions for the visa waiver form, such as "are you an international terrorist?" If you're stupid enough to answer "Yes" to this, then you don't deserve to enter the country. At the immigration desk, you now have a much longer wait (so it's worth getting yourself off the plane and in the long queue as quickly as possible) and they scan each fore-finger and take a digital photo of you. Apparently they check this matches up when you leave, then delete all your records. You then have to collect your bags, go through customs and get your bags checked through to your next flight. George managed to rescue his bag before it got shunted off into oblivion at this point.

We arrived at San Francisco slightly ahead of schedule and picked up our hire car with little fuss, except it was cheaper to upgrade our small car to a 4WD Jeep than fit a ski rack. We got to the Fisherman’s Wharf Hilton with little fuss and a bit of help from LizLiz.