Carla and I ventured to Newquay today to join Katie and Indy for 10km of their epic Lands End to John O' Groats Walk! Great weather, wildlife and company made for a lush day out!! Follow their journey using #MarineMiles and please consider donating to Hebridean Whale & Dolphin Trust using link below!

Northern Lights
Aurora borealis
Falmouth, Cornwall
Yesterday

one showing well but distantly to north overnight; please park carefully and respect residents' privacy

Can’t recommend this enough, I had the most amazing time when I did my placement year at sandwich bay and learnt so much. I gained some really valuable experience and in the loveliest place with the loveliest people!

As Risso’s are starting to return to Cornwall it’s a great time for me to put out a reminder of my masters project! I’m studying the SW England Risso’s population through photo-identification and so need as many fin shots as possible! Send them over to [email protected] 🐬

We’ve rescheduled our Flushing walk to next Saturday due to bad weather preventing the boat crossing on our original date! Book your place at bto.org/community/even…

The adult male golden oriole at church cove was a delight this afternoon after a failed early morning looking for the pennance point bird! Been my most wanted bird for a long time and it really didn’t disappoint, still can’t quite believe how bright that yellow is in person!

Pennance Point strikes again! A late evening twitch for an adult male Golden Oriole at my favourite part of my patch resulted in success with fantastic flight views for myself and carla at 19:50 after a 45 minute search. Massive thanks to finder!

Cornwall Birds

Here’s a couple of bits of footage from our BRUVS deployments on the Scillies! The first video shows a female nursehound in sandy habitat, the second two small-spotted catshark and a few pollack in amongst the kelp 🌊

Summer plumage black guillemot was a nice surprise on yesterdays AK Wildlife Cruises trip out! Also plenty of sandwich terns, a few starting to come up the estuary, and a huge movement of manxies offshore constantly streaming past the boat! 700 was a conservative estimate! 🌊

After a really great week on the Scillies, it’s time for us to depart on everyone’s favourite boat, #ScillonianIII . Thanks to the staff Kristian Metcalfe Owen Exeter Alice Trevail Vance Mak for making it such an enjoyable trip for us all! #MVEC

Then on the boat on the way back we picked up a few crab pots that had been set in advance to see what we’d caught! We had a nice mix of crabs as well as a couple of lobsters, including a huge female with eggs! We measured and weighed them all before releasing back to the sea 🦀

This morning we headed to St Helen’s with Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust to see how rat eradication on the island is progressing to protect seabird chicks from predation. We were shown evidence of the last few rats remaining on the island and talked through how they plan to get it down to zero!

Today was a quieter day due to a storm preventing any boat activity. We started off going through our BRUV footage (we’ll share some video soon!) with species recorded including nursehound, triggerfish and small-spotted catshark, followed by a talk on seabirds by Alice Trevail

Little detour yesterday on the way back to the hostel from a boat trip as part of our Marine Vertebrate MSc (U of Exeter) Scillies field course to see the green winged teal on shooters pool!

Job alert! There’s an exciting opportunity to join BTO as Youth Engagement Manager. 😀 Discover more and apply 👉 bit.ly/YEManager

Closing date for applications: 10 April

This afternoon we were then back out on the boat to have a go at deploying BRUVS (baited remote underwater video systems). 3 BRUVS were left for an hour each in different locations, stay tuned to see what we managed to catch on camera when we check out the footage tomorrow! 🌊

This morning we went over to St Agnes for a walk around Gugh with Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust to learn about the successes and challenges of the rat eradication project! After being caught in a hail storm, we were lucky enough to hear a Manx shearwater in its burrow responding to playback!

We had a brilliant boat trip out this morning with plenty of seabirds, including a good number of puffins! Then this afternoon a great talk from Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust about the rat eradication program on St Agnes and St Helens, which we’ll be getting involved with later in the week! 🌊