In comparison to some of the recent weeks this week has felt a little non-eventful. With only one of the two scheduled visitor boats making it to the island, the week has been mainly taken up with simple maintenance tasks such as gardening and painting.
Our ducks busy enjoying their morning feed
Vicky and I began constructing a new fence for the wildlife garden to keep visitors from walking on the slow worm sheets, with Vicky having to finish the project off herself after I injured my shoulder.
I spent a fair amount of time in the garden trying to encourage our crops to grow, but unfortunately all of the signs of a cold spring and late planting are evident as they are well behind where they should be by now. The weeds on the other hand seem to have little problem growing as I have dispatched 3 wheelbarrows full of the things this week.
With the rarity of a warm non-windy day occurring yesterday, some of the group went for a walk around the low tide mark of the island. It gives a great new perspective of the island when the tide allows you to walk this far out and look back.
A very low tide allows you to walk quite a distance away from the island
With the wind being too strong to carry out the week's scheduled butterfly survey, we spent one afternoon searching for gulls with identification rings. Each year 100 young gulls are ringed so that sightings of them can be monitored throughout their lives. Whenever we see a ringed gull on the island we are able to send in it's ring number and receive a "history" of the bird, including it's age and other places that have reported seeing the bird. Some of the birds that we have seen on the island this year have been as far afield as Spain and Portugal.
This gull has a white ring with black writing that reads "N00X". We will now report this sighting and await it's history report.
The news story that we leave you with this week is truly remarkable, and it just goes to show you that age really is no boundary! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8065370.stm
Have a good week everybody!
I'm sure the 95 year old lady doing the abseil was the one we watched on the news and she helped a young lad part way down who was having a few problems on his first ever abseil. !!!!
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