Natural History Museum on the Isles of Scilly

"Happy but exhausted."

That was Rosemary Parslow, leader of our visits to the Isles of Scilly and 'local legend', after her week on the islands with a team from the Natural History Museum. Dwarf Pansy, Blue-ray Limpets, rare lichen and the wonderful Clingfish were amongst the finds during their week.
Read more on the NHM blog

 

Wildlife Travel news, May 2013

Believe it or not, the spring is almost over! We have just two more spring trips left to run: to Macedonia next week, and Mull the week after. The last few days have seen Wildlife Travel groups returning from trips to the Burren, Poland and Romania, where the group not only enjoyed the Danube in full flood for the first time in several years, but were also amazingly lucky in the Carpathians and saw not only Brown Bear but also two Wolves... I am, of course, incredibly jealous.

A couple of new trip reports are now up on our website, from our visits to Costa Rica in February and Crete in April.

With our October visit to Chile now confirmed (still plenty of places if you want to join us for flamingos, Mediterranean botany and Diademed Sandpiper-Plover!), the Algarve looking set to be confirmed in the next few days and our trip to Turkey almost fully booked the autumn is already looking to be a good one.

And plans are well underway for 2014 and beyond... Western Australia in September 2014 anyone?

Outer Hebrides: North and South Uist and Benbecula, May 2013

I'm just back from a long weekend on the Outer Hebrides: good company, some surprisingly good weather and plenty of good birding.

My weekend started with a train journey from Glasgow through to Oban. The harbour walls are home to some very photogenic Black Guillemots, with several adults in nesting crevices, on the rocks or on the sea, calling to each other, a delightful trilling call. One particularly boisterous adult was sitting on the top of the harbour wall, chasing pigeons across the pavement, seemingly oblivous to passers by.

From Oban, our ferry took us up past the end of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, around the top of Mull and across the Minch to Lochboisdale on South Uist. During the journey we saw an amazing five White-tailed Eagles, including a couple talon-grappling and cartwheeling down through the air; a pair of displaying Goshawks; a distant Golden Eagle; hundreds of Manx Shearwaters out in the Minch; a single Basking Shark and a handful of Harbour Porpoises, as well as a glimpsed (not by me) Minke Whale.

During our three days, we pretty thoroughly explored South and North Uist. A particular target of the trip was to be the northward passage of skuas, an event which is pretty much dependent on just the right weather conditions. Alas, for us, the wind was in exactly the wrong direction for almost all of our time on the islands, so it was quite a surprise to have a spectacularly beautiful adult Long-tailed Skua drive lazily over our heads while we were walking across the machair near Sollas, in the (unsuccessful in both cases) hunt for a male Snowy Owl who has been in the area for the last year or two, and Great Yellow Bumblebee (which I suspect just isn't out so early in the season.).

From nearby Aird an Runair headland we saw a handful of breeding plumaged Pomarine Skuas and another couple of Long-tailed Skuas: a relief to see, but slightly gutting that the last few days have seen a spectacular passage past the same spot of thousands of both. Ah well, we can't have everything...

There's definitely more to the Uists than skua passage. A highlight for me was the presence of so many breeding waders: displaying/singing Dunlin, Redshank, Snipe and Lapwing were a constant soundtrack, with good numbers of Turnstone around the coast in breeding plumage, together with a couple of Purple Sandpipers. Whimbrel passed by frequently, and at a traditional site we found at least three Red-necked Phalaropes, a windswept male and, a couple of days later, two boisterous females. The other famous breeding bird of the outer Hebrides is the Corncrake, and we heard several singing males, with one showing well in a patch of irises. We also found at least a couple of pairs of Whooper Swans, while Twite and Rock Dove were also good to see, not birds we're used to down in lowland England.

No visit to the Hebrides would be complete without an otter encounter or two. We enjoyed a long lunch break with the female below, as she hunted very successfully along a short section of rocky shore, catching crabs and a lumpsucker. On our final evening we had two separate animals fishing just off shore from the (highly recommended) pub where we ate our farewell meal.

The ferry journey back to the mainland was pretty successful, mammal-wise as well. We encountered three pods of Short-beaked Common Dolphins, a couple of very brief Bottle-nosed Dolphins and a small pod of White-beaked Dolphins, the latter a world 'tick' for me.

And as well as the Hebridean specialities, we also enjoyed our fair share of rarities. We 'dipped' the male Snowy Owl, which was present on the machair near Sollas two days before we arrived and was there again two days after we left the islands, but was certainly nowhere to be found on our two visits to its favourite corner of North Uist. But we did find the male Green-winged Teal on South Uist and the Lesser Canada Goose at Balranald on North Uist, both of which had been present for some time. We also bumped in to a young Iceland Gull feeding on ploughed machair. Almost the final bird of our visit to the Hebrides appeared as we were walking back from Aird an Runair on our last evening. A small buffy bird flew across the path and landed nearby on an area of ploughed machair. Something about it attracted all our attention, and it was very soon clear that we had found a Short-toed Lark, most definitely something of a surprise!

 'Our' Short-toed Lark, at Balranald. digiscoped photo by Jo Thomas

The trip finished with a short detour on the drive back to York, and a Thrush Nightingale putting on a show at Hartlepool: a 'lifer' for two of our group (including myself).

salt and pepper

A fantastic screen grab of one of the amazing salt-'snotting' Marine Iguanas on Fernandina, taken by tour participants Lyn & Alan.

Galapagos 2013

Another year, another visit to the Galapagos Islands, one place for which the right words are hard to find. Superlatives don't really work, when it comes to describing the Galapagos, and I have to revert to their original name of Las Islas Encantadas... their enchantment has totally worked its spell on me. I'm just back from my sixth visit to the islands, and if anything I'm more enchanted now that ever before!

This year's trip came after a good wet season, with the islands looking very green: butterflies were in amazing abundance this year, much more so than I've ever seen before, and families of finches were everywhere, both the result of a good flush of growth during the season before.

This year we headed out to the western islands of Isabela and Fernandina, the first time I've been here since my very first visit to the islands in 2007 (it feels a very long time ago now!). The lovely little dirt-track town of Puerto Villamil on Isabela was a revelation (I will make it a priority to come back here some time: the perfect place to escape from the world!) and it was good to see Flightless Cormorants again, a surprisingly handsome bird.

Isabela was where we got good views of Galapagos Martin, a bird I hadn't even seen before last year. The total population is estimated to be under 500 birds, although this is very much a finger in the air guesstimate and my guess would be that this is on the generous side. With no surveys of the islands and very little attention from the conservation community, this is perhaps the least known of Galapagos's endemic birds: it is currently categorised by BirdLife as Endangered. We saw three or four at Punta Moreno and another five or six at a nesting cliff at Tagus Cove.

West of Isabela and in the Bolivar Channel, between Isabela and Fernandina, we had close encounters with two groups of dolphins: a pod of about 30 Bottle-nosed Dolphins came in to ride the bow on our way to Tagus Cove, with plenty of tail lobbing and playful breaching; heading north from Punta Espinosa, a patch of 'busy' water in the distance revealed itself as a pod of more than 100 amazingly acrobatic Short-beaked Common Dolphins (above) who we travelled with for a while, accompanied by a chorus of whoops and wows from us on the boat; and shortly after the dolphins, a Bryde's Whale appeared in front of the boat, spouting a couple of times before sinking down into the deep.

Also in this area, we had close up encounters with several Galapagos Petrels. This Critically Endangered endemic breeds up in the highlands of the larger islands and is suffering from the invasion of its breeding sites by non-native plants (notably Quinine and Hill Raspberry) and predation by introduced mammals (rats and cats in particular). On Santa Cruz we visited the breeding habitat, the Miconia 'forest' around Media Luna, where we found the skeleton of an adult.

Aeshna galapagoensis, the Galapagos Hawker was present in good numbers up at Media Luna, with many pairs in wheel.

My first Paint-billed Crake (and chick, bottom right). This family (with four chicks) ran across the track in front of us on Santa Cruz soon after a similar family of Galapagos Rails, and we saw at least another four of five of the latter during our couple of days on the island.  It seems the breeding season has been a good one for these two as well. There are now just three Galapagos breeding species left for me to see: Sooty Tern, out on Darwin and Wolf; Mangrove Finch, which just hangs on at two sites on Isabela, both now out of bounds to visitors; and Sharp-beaked Ground Finch, which I inexplicably missed on my visit to Genovesa a couple of years ago. I'm hoping to be back on Genovesa next year...

A feature of the islands this year was the super abundance, in some locations, of butterflies. Galapagos Sulphur and Galapagos Blue were both as common and widespread as usual and there were also a handful of Monarch on the wing on the larger islands. At Tagus Cove on Isabela, swarms of Galapagos Long-tailed Skipper were feeding on Waltheria flowers, with literally hundreds of individuals seen during the short walk up to the viewpoint. And even more impressive were the butterflies on Santiago: where in the past I have seen one or two Galapagos Silver Fritillaries (above), this year there were hundreds of individuals, together with a mass emergence of the Queen (top), again all nectaring on Waltheria. 

The other group that have obviously done well from the wet season were the finches. The arid zone areas were full of family groups of Small and Medium Ground Finch and Cactus Finch, with Small Tree Finch common in the higher areas. As usual, Large Ground Finch was easiest to find around the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz, with Woodpecker Finches and Highland Warbler Finches up in the highlands of Santa Cruz and Isabela. Not always an easy bird to find, we came across pairs of Vegetarian Finches at the CDRS and up in the highlands of Santa Cruz, while a single male Large Tree Finch, always a tricky bird to get a good look at, was found at Los Gemelos. The most unlikely of the finch sightings was a confiding juvenile Woodpecker Finch, normally a bird of the highlands, down in the arid zone at the CDRS. Even odder was it's behavious, begging for food from a juvenile Medium Ground Finch, who even-more-bizarrely seemed to be responding!

male Vegetarian Finch on the edge of the El Chatto tortoise reserve

juvenile Woodpecker Finch at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Rather sadly, this individual was showing the early signs of avian pox, a disease which first arrived in the islands in the late 1800s. The wart-like lesions on the feet also spread into the upper respiratory tract, with a high mortality rate...

A full trip report is available to download from the Wildlife Travel website, with a gallery of photos from this year's visit on flickr.

 

We will be returning to Galapagos in April 2014, with a visit to the world's largest colony of Red-footed Boobies on Genovesa (and another chance at Sharp-beaked Ground Finch!). Let us know if you'd like to join us!