We're excited to be hosting this project on Seabird Watch, to help improve monitoring of UK cormorants! Big thanks to our PhD student Alice Edney for setting it up online 💻

Visit seabirdwatch.org to get involved!📸🥚🐣

#ornithology #seabirds #CitizenScience #CitSci

This work was possible thanks to grant funding from The Seabird Group and The SOC. A huge thank you to Alice Edney for @SeabirdWatch support. This project would not be possible without landowner cooperation and boating to the island, for which I am very grateful.

Calling all cormorant connoisseurs! Check out the 'Great Cormorants: Best on the Nest' workflow Seabird Watch (tinyurl.com/a6ttvdmh) and get clicking! All your efforts will contribute to monitoring productivity and phenology in a very under monitored #seabird ! 1/

The cliff nesting auks are starting to settle down, with the first eggs found today. A Guillemot egg was five days earlier than both the first of last year and the 2013-2023 mean, the first Razorbill eggs three days before the first of last year and one day before the mean.

One of our amazing volunteers found a Brünnich's Guillemot egg in this photo from Greenland! Guillemot eggs vary widely in colour & have intricate patterns. This one is a lovely blue-green. Let us know if you manage to spot it! 🥚🧐

seabirdwatch.org #seabirds #ornithology

Lapwings are a fast declining breeding bird in Oxfordshire but today we located one of the few remaining Lapwing colonies left along the Thames floodplain meadows. We found six nests with full clutches and a brood of hatched young all monitored for the BTO Nest Record Scheme.

Great to see kittiwakes repopulating their coastal nest sites across Scotland. Here's hoping this breeding season is a successful one for this incredible gull species.

Watch the Dunbar Harbour kittiwake colony LIVE here⬇️
seabird.org/webcams/dunbar…

#EastLothian

📷©️J McDermaid

This morning our rangers were monitoring Staffa's black guillemots, also known as tysties. Happy to report we still have a healthy population of these endearing birds - love their big red clown feet! National Trust for Scotland The Seabird Group Seabird Surveys UK Seabird Monitoring Programme Ellie Owen
📷Terry Ward

Have you ever seen a #seabird not feeding their own chick? 🐥👀 In some species it is quite common, while in others it is not often reported. Is it because it is rare or are there other reasons?
Check out our new paper: doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1…
#ornithology

A time-lapse camera was installed this week to monitor Kittiwakes on Dùn. An ongoing collaboration between Seabird Watch and National Trust for Scotland, the images will provide valuable data on breeding success and will involve #citizenscientists through The Zooniverse website. #NTSSeabirds .

We are thrilled to see this camera finally up and running and cannot wait to share the images with our #citsci volunteers. Thanks craig nisbet, Alice Edney and Sally Kunzig for pulling this off

Doing meta-analysis w/ colleagues. We noticed large differences in papers found when doing same search with Clarivate Web of Science. Search returns vary depending on institution subscriptions. I suspect many aren't aware of this. Defeats the purpose of standardized searches!

This is the message everyone should be taking home from today’s despicable announcement.

The number of people of working age with a health condition or a disability is going up.

And not because they’ve all suddenly become work-shy scroungers🙄

Long (sorry!) 🧵

1/25

Every spring I get at least 2 odd phylloscs. This presumed Willow Warbler is tiny, brown, and has an odd moult (fresher outer PPs and secondaries than inner primaries, 2 shredded tertials) a hint of a 6th pp emargination & quite an Iberian Chiffchaff adjacent wing formula. 1/2

Ringing has its ups & downs and today we had both... The session got off to a cracking start when we caught our 1st Grasshopper Warbler (out of 2 reeling) at a site where they're now less than annual! But we had to leave shortly after, as a herd of cows broke into the field 🐮

The unconventional life history of the American woodcock—first direct evidence of itinerant breeding in a migratory bird, an incredibly rare breeding strategy that involves the temporal overlap of migratory and reproductive periods | ow.ly/qaAk50RhYHc #ProcB Colby Slezak

Ever looked at a bar chart and thought “there must be a better way of plotting this data…”? Look no further than sea stack plots!
doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1… with Dr. Maja Ilić Benno Simmons and Bill Sutherland

Most years we catch one to two Green Woodpeckers, so it was great to catch our first for 2024 last week. Even better, this is the first Green Woodpecker we've re-trapped! She was originally ringed by us in September 2023, and was caught in exactly the same net ride!

Most of my #FalklandsShags study colonies are counted from the ground but some are just *too* big. UAVs are useful for photographing big flat colonies, so I can now slowly count our biggest colony, one bird at a time, from the comfort of home. Any guesses on final colony size? 1/

The first 3 Grey Herons ringed today as part of our new project. Please report sightings of our colour ringed Herons, Little Egrets and Cormorants BTO #ringing #herons