The Shiants

I had the opportunity to join the first week of the Shiant Isles seabird monitoring trip, organised by the Shiants Seabird Research Group led by Jim Lennon. The Shiants are a group of three uninhabited islands between Skye and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. They support nationally important populations of over 200,000 seabirds and the two-week trip is timed to coincide with chicks being of ringable age.

We took a chartered boat from Uig on Skye, stopping off on the way at the island of Fladda Chuain to see what breeding birds we could find. We ringed 43 Arctic Tern chicks, as well as small numbers of Oystercatcher, Ringed Plover and Great Black-backed Gull. From the boat we saw a pod of Common Dolphins and two Manx Shearwaters.

Our main priorities were to complete the Razorbill RAS and Puffin RAS, which stands for Retrapping Adults for Survival and is a way to get consistent datasets across years to calculate the adult survival rates for individual species. During the Puffin RAS we also collected fish samples dropped at the net to analyse the success of their foraging.

The week was hugely impacted by rain and 45 mph winds, but when there were breaks in the weather we also managed to identify Great Skua territories, colour-ring Great Black-backed Gull and Herring Gull chicks, spring-trap Wheatears and Rock Pipits on the beach, mist net Storm Petrels at night, collect and fit new geolocators, and complete the daily log, with highlights being Golden Eagle, White-tailed Eagle and Arctic Skua.

One of the Storm Petrels was a control that was ringed 21 years ago. We’re waiting to find out where it was ringed.

On the boat back to Uig we saw Common Dolphin again and Sooty Shearwater.

In week 2, the group hopes to ring Razorbill and Guillemot chicks in the boulder field, find and ring Shag chicks, and fit more geolocators. In week 3, a small number of people will look for evidence of breeding Storm Petrels on the island of Shillay.

Thank you very much to Jim and the whole week 1 team for their support. I found it a steep learning curve, but I have a passion for seabirds and it was a good experience to see how they can be monitored for maximum return on useful data. 

Holly