[John]

We had about three hours of darkness to play with, that was all, as it didn’t get fully dark until midnightish and was light again for about 3am. This year the conditions were relatively calm and warm for the entire 5 days and nights (the following year had poured down with rain for the first three of the five nights and we had got absolutely soaked).

It wasn’t long before small dark, bat like, shapes were seen flying into the mist nets. It became a bit of a race to get to the birds quickly and extricate them from the nets. My job was to be the gofar, collecting the small cotton bags, with a couple of birds in them, and taking them to the ringer, then bringing back the empty bags back to those collecting the birds.

Each night they asked me to stay with the ringer for about half an hour to see how they ringed the birds. It was fascinating watching them ring the birds, measure up all the relevant features, wings & head etc. The next job was to enter the details of the sizes, ring numbers fitted, ring numbers already on the birds etc. The latter was necessary to determine how long between ringing it had been. Also the ring numbers once checked would tell you where they were previously rung and possibly how old they were. These figures were sent to (I think the BTO) and a few months down the line the information gathered from this spell of ringing would come back to John. Over the two years I was with them the oldest Storm Petrel we were aware of was over 34 as that had been how many years it had been between ringing. How old the bird was would remain unknown but it certainly was over 35. We also knew of birds that had been rung in such far flung places as Portugal and South Africa.

On the third day they asked if I wanted to ring the birds myself. I felt both honoured and worried. Honoured because I wasn’t a trained ringer, and they trusted me to do it, and worried because of how small and vulnerable these birds looked. But I managed it with relative ease, obviously with excellent direction, and over the next couple of nights rang quite a few Stormies.

On the 4th night, after ringing for half an hour I was called to the nets to have a go at extricating the birds. Now this did really worry me as there was a real art to doing this but John, and a Russian and a German ringer assured me that as long as I studied what they did I would be all right.

The first Stormie was treated with total gentleness but it was obvious that these birds were far more robust than they look and soon I was easing out first the wings and anything else caught up in the nets. I was told that I couldn’t be too slow in taking the birds out as it might cause them to struggle and injure themselves, so I quickly learned what pressure I could use and soon I was into the swing of things. On the 5th night I was left to do it on my own after John and the others had watched me for a few minutes. That will go down as moment in my life that I will never forget.

Half way through the night an excited shout went up. “We got a Leaches”. Everything stopped for a moment and then it was confirmed that a Leache’s Petrel had been caught (photo below). We couldn’t stop to look at it at that time as we were too busy so it was decided that after it had been rung and the details entered it would be kept quiet in the cotton bag so we could all have a look at it. Not long after the Stormies, for the first time, really slowed down in numbers so we decided to call it a day early. We all gathered around the ringers and the Leaches was taken out of the bag for us all to look at. This was the first Leache’s to be rung on this island for at least 5 years and only about the third in 10 years. It was also my very first look at a Leache’s and I even had the chance to hold it and to admire the bird close up.

I have total admiration for these Storm Petrels. Little bigger than a House Sparrow, they spend all the daylight hours out at sea, battling the elements, before returning to land at dusk. Below is a photo of one that we found in daylight in the bracken near the cliffs. It had left it to late to fly off and was hunkered down amongst the bracken too frightened to fly off in case the gulls got it.

I have attached a photo of the Leaches we caught and the Stormie that was found in the Bracken.

Again I apologise for the quality but these are 8 years old and taken with a very basic camera.

John