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| The Brigg is always great value in late summer, with seabirds stopping off from July onwards - including this confiding Arctic Tern.... |
As late spring became summer, so the work season intensified, with surveys, running the Living Seas Centre at weekends and guiding all benefiting from the exceptionally fair, often sunny conditions. It was undoubtedly the warmest and most settled summer since we moved up here almost seven years ago, and any time off was spent with the many fine friends who came and stayed with us or grabbing odd evenings and days off in the forests and elsewhere away from the masses.
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| .... and this equally accommodating Roseate Tern |
A whirlwind trip to Birdfair in there somewhere was a pleasure, delivering a talk in the Zeiss marquee about our Champions of the Flyway experience (below) and catching up with lots of good people; local meanderings, meanwhile, were confined to enjoying the usual breeding species (including ongoing surveys at the Filey Cliffs colony), cetacean watches from Carr Naze (it was another great Minke Whale summer, with White-beaked Dolphins also passing offshore several times), wanders pre- and post-work at Flamborough, and sessions on the Brigg, enjoying returning shorebirds and the first real pulses of seabird migration.
Guiding activities included a particularly memorable day leading a Seabirds and Cetaceans pelagic for Yorkshire Coast Nature in early August off Staithes, a little further up the coast. Multiple Minkes, (very) numerous Harbour Porpoise and plenty of quality seabirds were all upstaged by a prolonged, superbly personal encounter with a mischievous pod of White-beaked Dolphins....
... genuinely magical, and yet another reminder of what a truly special place our stretch of North Sea coast is for wildlife and close encounters with it. More on this incredible day here.
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| White-beaked Dolphins were the unrivalled stars .... |
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| ... but 'chimney sweep' juvenile Puffins take a lot of beating |
In our situation, summer holidays are very much an exception, and so it was a rare pleasure to escape for a good, long stretch in August and early September thanks to my lovely in-laws: Amity and I joined them, their other offspring and partners (and their offspring) in the Catskills in upstate New York, for a family vacation to celebrate their anniversary in the same area they honeymooned no less than 40 years previously....
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| Black-and-white Warbler in the garden |
It was a special trip with an extended family I'm very fortunate to have inherited and grown close to, and while it was by no means bird / wildlife orientated, with us being effectively out in the sticks in a cabin in the woods for much of the time meant wildlife collateral was happily unavoidable.
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| Osprey at a nearby waterbody |
Birds and mammals inevitably played starring cameo roles, with bears being particularly .... (including daytime wanders across the lawn and night-time raids on the house) - more on this trip here, here and here.
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| Canada Warbler in the garden |
Back in the UK by early September, and with autumn proper kicking in here on the Yorkshire coast, it was to be a season to remember....
more to follow...
