We thought that 2023 was an odd year for Barn Owls, but 2024 seemed to continue the trend! The very wet spring was perhaps a boom for early grass growth, with a consequent increase in vole numbers. So 2024 saw our highest ever average clutch size (5.4), with three clutches of eight eggs being found. This didn't necessarily feed through into large broods though, with the average (3.2) very much in line with the last couple of years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 Sites visited 41 47 64 85 87 106 93 112 127 150 Unoccupied 11 12 23 34 36 43 35 34 29 66 Occupied, no br ..read more

Over the long bank holiday weekend we had a chance to make our first visits to Barn Owl nestboxes across part of our patch. It was a long slog, with plenty of sites covered and overall it seems to be an early season with several broods of good-sized chicks and even some not too far off ringing age. But of more interest were some of the 28 adults caught over the weekend (just eight were new, unringed birds), which had some surprising histories. Overall, there were plenty of short movements, which is what we'd expect from dispersing juveniles, but you can see from the map below that these birds ..read more

Mullion Island Cormorants are already well into their breeding season now, with some chicks almost ready to fledge. Our regular count from photos found a reciord 75 nests across the front of the island, beating the 73 nests in 2021 and 72 in 1999. Annoyingly, photographs also showed an interloper in the colony. This white- (or blue-) ringed bird is likely to be from Wales or Ireland, but without being able to read the ring we'll never know. We're currently investigating the options for remote pan-tilt-zoom cameras, so watch this space. The highlight from this weekend was a great sighting by ..read more

After one of the strangest springs weather-wise, the Barn Owl season seemed to be all over the place in 2023. We had regular sites unoccupied, non-breeding birds at some sites and some exceptionally late broods. Even now we have a few sites where we need to revisit to ring chicks! With some new funding from the FiPL project (Farming in Protected Landscapes) managed by the Cornwall AONB, we are continuing to expand our monitoring, this year onto the Roseland peninsula, with some new ringer recruits this year as well from the National Trust. So whilst we still have some siets to check, the total ..read more

Last month saw us able to mist net Storm Petrels down at Porthgwarra on two nights, catching a total of 119 birds. Of these, 113 were unringed, three were ringed by us in previous years and three were already wearing rings from elsewhere: ringed on Great Saltee Island (Co Wexford) three days earlier ringed on Little Saltee Island (Co Wexford) in July 2022 ringed at Torre de Hercules in northern Spain in July 2015, although since then it had managed to lose a foot, a surprisingly regular phenomenon in Storm Petrels! Two birds we ringed on the same night were also recaught 21 days later on B ..read more

It's been a strange summer for lots of our regular projects, with freak weather, bird flu and remnants of Covid still making life difficult. Some of our birds have fared particularly badly, with Kittiwake reduced to just one successful sitre across Cornwall, a crying shame. Our Barn Owl monitoring continued pretty much unaffected though and despite the drought, birds actually seemed to do OK. The project continued to grow and we personally visited over 100 boxes for the first time, which is no mean feat. Despite clutch sizes being nothing special, birds survived quite well and were about avera ..read more

With spring migrants back in earnest and everything singing and nest-buiilding, it was a good time to have another look at the Portreath Kittiwakes. Probably only 75% of the birds were back on ledges, with plenty of space left to fill, so hopefully birds just aren't settled yet. Despite the sun, a bit of hazy sea fret made life a bit difficult ring-reading but we still managed to pick up three of our regular French-ringed birds. OBM-WLN was ringed as a chick at Pointe du Raz in 2011 and has been seen regularly at Portreath ever since RYM-ROO is a 2014 chick, first seen at Por ..read more

With the run of fine weather this week, it's the perfect chance to have a first look at some of our breeding seabirds. First stop yesterday was Mullion Island, where a few photographs from the cliffs revealed that the Cormorants were well into the breeding season, with some nests even having half-grown chicks exercising their wings. A scan of the photos revealed at least 69 nests, which is on a par with last year's record 73 nests. We then sat on the cliffs overlooking Rinsey zawn and waited patiently for sitting Shags to shuffle and show us what they're up to. In total there were 11 occupi ..read more

Storm Eunice brought a fair amount of destruction to the southwest, but there was one arrival that was a rather unexpected. When going out onto their farm near Lelant, one family were surprised to find an exhausted young swan in one of their fields. They picked it up and found that it was ringed, with both a metal ring and a yellow colour ring: CDBH. CDBH recovering on a Cornish farm (Selena Richards) With a bit of detective work, it was found to be a bird ringed as a cygnet in a park in Dublin in September 2021. It was quite happily seen in the park over the winter, last seen on 4th ..read more

Perhaps it's the fact that the weather is so wet and windy in Cornwall at the moment that another of our juvenile gulls has made the trip across the Channel to France. On Friday, W:377 was seen on the southern coast of Brittany near Sarzeau, loafing on a raft (for terns) with other juvenile gulls. W:377 at Marais de Suscinio Ringed as a chick in Falmouth in 2020 it hasn't been far before, last seen at Stithians Reservoir in August last year. See below it's short history, very helpfully prduced by the app created for us by Stephen Vickers, which you can use to report gulls to us here ..read more