Relaxed

While we were waiting for the boat from Martin’s Haven to Skomer this morning I fell into conversation with some first-time visitors, and mentioned that there are places on the island where the Puffins nest so close to the path that a long lens is actually a disadvantage, and you can capture perfectly respectable images with a phone. I think they were skeptical, but over the course of the day I took quite a few phone photos, and used one of them later when I originally wrote this post. Now I've been able to process my "proper" photos though, and I've replaced the phone shot with a couple of camera portraits that I particularly like.

As well as some of the 43,000 Puffins currently on Skomer, we enjoyed hundreds of other birds today. Razorbills, Guillemots, Kittiwakes, Short-eared Owls, Wheatears, Oystercatchers, Choughs, Meadow Pipits, Swallows, Sand Martins…. the list goes on and on. On the boat going over we even saw a couple of Gannets flying past, though these birds breed on nearby Grassholm rather than on Skomer.

It wasn’t all happy news though. Dotted all over the island there were Manx Shearwaters, but all of them were dead, having been killed by gulls or ravens. Skomer hosts the biggest breeding colony in the world of Manx Shearwaters - currently estimated at 350,000 pairs - but these burrow-nesting birds have to spend all day out at sea and try to avoid being caught on land, where they're clumsy and vulnerable. When they mistime their feeding forays, they’re liable to pay the ultimate price.

The thing I’d forgotten about this island is how very hilly it is, and how tiring five hours of scrambling up and down stony paths can be. To be fair, I’m eight years older than I was when I visited with R, and the weather today was much hotter and sunnier, but I can’t lie: I was exhausted by the time I tottered off the boat at the end of the afternoon  I’ve explained to my knees that we’re going to be doing it all again tomorrow (though possibly in the rain), but their response to this news was, “We’ll see.”