The bank holiday weekend plan was to see if we could ring some of the Cormorant chicks on Mullion Island, so a group of five of us paddled out on Saturday to have a look. We'd had to leave it this late as there were several nests 'behind the curve' this year, so ringing the larger chicks would have exposed the smaller chicks to predation from the many Great Black-backed Gulls also nesting on the island. However, because of the delayed visit the larger chicks were now too large to risk going onto the island, so we just satisfied ourselves with a paddle round the island counting breeding auks instead.
All was not lost over the weekend though, as a check on one of our Dipper boxes found not eggs but chicks, which were the perfect age for ringing. This was a bit unexpected, but perhaps my timings were a bit off! Sadly the second box on this stretch of river was unoccupied for the first time since we started monitoring in 2013.
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