Highland Wanderer

There are times that I forget I am not the only migrant from the Scottish Highlands to end up in Iceland.  Yesterday we spotted a greylag goose in one of our eider ponds at the Skalanes Reserve. This in itself is interesting but not unique as we have quite a few breeding pairs of greylag on the reserve.  What made this greylag different from all the others was the orange neck ring that it had on.

A couple of emails and a spot of investigation later and we discovered that our Orange ringed greylag had been rung as part of a joint project by the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT), the Icelandic Institute of Natural History and the Highland Ringing Group.

The bird was rung on 08/01/2011 just outside Golspie in Sutherland and this was the first time it had been reported since that date. The amusing thing from our point of view was that both Izzy and myself were working as volunteer wardens with the RSPB at the Forsinard Reserve, not a million miles away when this bird was rung.  Now we are all spending the summer in a rather cold and snowy Iceland.

As I mentioned, we have several pairs of greylags and this is the first one that has been spotted with a neck ring, so it is likely the awful weather has driven it from it´s nest site inland to a slightly better spot on the coast at the reserve.

Highland Wanderer

There are times that I forget I am not the only migrant from the Scottish Highlands to end up in Iceland.  Yesterday we spotted a greylag goose in one of our eider ponds at the Skalanes Reserve. This in itself is interesting but not unique as we have quite a few breeding pairs of greylag on the reserve.  What made this greylag different from all the others was the orange neck ring that it had on.

A couple of emails and a spot of investigation later and we discovered that our Orange ringed greylag had been rung as part of a joint project by the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT), the Icelandic Institute of Natural History and the Highland Ringing Group.

The bird was rung on 08/01/2011 just outside Golspie in Sutherland and this was the first time it had been reported since that date. The amusing thing from our point of view was that both Izzy and myself were working as volunteer wardens with the RSPB at the Forsinard Reserve, not a million miles away when this bird was rung.  Now we are all spending the summer in a rather cold and snowy Iceland.

As I mentioned, we have several pairs of greylags and this is the first one that has been spotted with a neck ring, so it is likely the awful weather has driven it from it´s nest site inland to a slightly better spot on the coast at the reserve.

It´s all in the name...

ICE-land...I know it sounds cold, but you would think that by May things would have been a little warmer. Well you would be wrong!

Izzy and I were intending to go exploring yesterday over the mountain, visiting a museum and the National Park Centre before having dinner with some artists in Seyðisfjörður.  Unfortunately it did not quite work out that way.  Over the last couple of days the winds have been coming from the north and the temperature has been hovering around freezing. We have had ice cold rain and sleet, then yesterday it began to snow.

We abandoned our trip out, but got a lift into town with Oli and Bjarki in time to have a lovely dinner, a few beers and spend the night in town.

Returning this morning, with a hay bale on a trailer, was a very "interesting" drive along the track to Skalanes. Drifting snow had made it hard to see the track (and ditches, rocks and streams!) and only Oli´s 3/4 buried tracks from the day before gave me any idea where the track actually was. Now normally the 4x4 (Nissan Patrol) would have coped fine, but also towing a trailer with a hay bale things started to get difficult as the car fought for grip and pulled itself and the trailer up the track. 

 

Now I am very glad that last summer I did my LANTRA Professional Off-Road Driving course and also that I spent a snowy winter at the RSPB Forsinard Reserve in the North of Scotland. So that when the car was sliding at a 45 degree angle across the track I did not panic, but followed what I had been taught and learned from experience.

As I have said, it was an interesting drive but also a very beautiful one, with a blue sky and sunshine over the snow covered mountains.  Luckily Skalanes itself is free of snow, so as the track come back down to the coast the driving was much easier. We even came across a herd of Reindeer (15 of them) and can add Snow Bunting to our reserve bird list.

Drivers view of the track out to Skalanes

Oli´s tracks from the day before were the only guide to where the track is!

Beautiful day for a drive!

The view looking towards skalanes

The new sign just beyond our first carpark
(You wouldn´t have even made the carpark today without a 4x4!!)

Back at Skalanes we discovered we had a burst pipe in the boiler room, so we are currently without water until tomorrow, and Oli just phoned to let us know one of the Volcanoes in the South has erupted. It is not expected to cause the same ash cloud as the one last year (as it is under a glacier) but it will probably cause flooding in the south of Iceland.

Well...what can I say, Iceland is an interesting place to live and work!!

Who stole the sun?!

So the centre opened on Sunday 15^th May and we had quite a few local people come out to visit the cliffs and have a coffee.  Since then the weather has taken a major turn for the worst. The thermometer hovers around zero degrees Celsius during the day, the cattle are sheltering beside the centre and the pigs/chickens have confined themselves to their respective turf sheds. There is snow on the lower ridge and we had a slushy white covering down by the centre for some of the day.

The eider ducks have started coming up onto the land now in search of suitable nesting sites and luckily we had just finished constructing a new eider shelter, split into 18 separate nest areas so there is some shelter from the weather (and predators) for these lucky ladies. When we built it on Tuesday the sun was out and it was t-shirt weather, how things have changed!!

The arctic terns are now here in force and are getting more defensive each day. Not at the stage of diving at people yet, just circling over head and “shouting” at you as you walk to the car or up the track. They too are at the stage of looking for suitable nest sites and hopefully soon we will see them on eggs.

On the sustainability front Izzy has been dabbling with making fresh bread and the home brew has been siphoned off and is now in phase two of the settling process.

The weather makes it hard to get out to do anything on the reserve as you are soaked to the skin and frozen to death after spending 15 minutes outside!

Our first SEEDS (http://www.seeds.is) volunteer group arrives on Saturday night so hopefully the weather will improve so we can get out to do some work with them on the reserve.  I am under no illusion that the wetland dam will require further repairs after the continual and heavy rain we have had.

On the positive side we have now seen two separate pairs of Arctic Skua around the reserve so I should have at least one pair (if I can locate a nest) to study over the summer. We also have a lovely roaring fire downstairs which keeps the house nice and warm and reduces our energy bills. (No coal, only driftwood from the sea and scrap wood from town)

Time to huddle in front of the fire, drink tea and try not to think about the weather outside until it has all blown over…

Bjarki and I working on the Eider shelters

Almost complete...18 nest sites to rent!
Comfortable nest, with sea view and protection from aerial predators and the weather!

Roaring, warm log fire!

22:20!

I cannot wait to see what midnight on the longest day is like when outside is like this at 22:20 on 11/05/11

Target Practice

 It is an issue in the UK (and across the world) that can quite often be contentious, but in the context of conservation the use of firearms is quite often necessary.

In the western world humanity has removed many of the top predators from their place in the food chain, leaving us with unnaturally high and unsustainable levels of some species such as Red Deer and Rabbits.

Non-native species such as American Mink, released into the UK by well meaning animal rights protestors from fur farms, can have a devastating effect on ground nesting birds and rodent species.

Left without any control these species can have a major impact on the flora and fauna of our wild places.  

At Skalanes we have two species that require a little control.  Having large colonies of ground nesting birds we must protect them against the non-native American Mink, which is normally done through trap/dispatch.  There are also a couple of breeding Arctic Foxes on the reserve.  As long as these keep to the upper areas of the reserve where they predominantly prey on Ptarmigan and away from the ground nesting colonies they are left alone.  However if allowed to prey on these colonies they would soon have a massive impact on bird species that are unable to protect themselves from this kind of predation.

Hopefully predator control is something we will not have to do while on the reserve here, however it is often a part of a rangers work.  There is no joy in killing these animals but it is necessary and without it we would see many of the breeding bird species here disappear.  We should not kid ourselves that we can simply leave the wild world alone, man has changed the balance and now management is required to maintain that balance and allow as diverse a range of plants and animals as possible to thrive.

With that in mind, Izzy and I went out this morning to do a spot of target practice and will hopefully have further chances to improve our skills over the coming weeks. Please note that only paper targets were harmed in the taking of these photos.

Stock handling!

I am often asked by people "what does a ranger do?" - The reply invariably involves land management, environmental education, survey and monitoring and guided walks. As of yesterday I can now add "stock handling" to the list.

By stock handling I do not just mean moving a couple of chickens (this fun is still to come!) but I mean wrestling with a 500kg pig, 3 piglets, 2 adult cows and 2 calves. I would like to share a couple of observations with you:

1. Animals do not like being moved in trailers
2. Pigs are sly, cunning and very intelligent! 
3. Pigs have a sweet tooth, but are intelligent enough to make you "think" they are going into the trailer so that you give them more goodies, and then charge right through your wooden boards that are used to direct them!
4. Wooden boards do not work well with 500kg pigs!
5. Piglets do not like being loaded into trailers when you need them to go in, but will quite happily wander in and out when you already have them at their destination.
6. When trying to put a 500kg pig into a trailer, one should leave approximately 3 hours!
7. A 500kg pig will not go into a trailer if it does not want to, but a 500kg pig that HAS gone into trailer quite often cannot get out of it again if it has to go backwards.
8. Putting a calf in a trailer to encourage it´s mother inside is good in principle, but not when said calf seems to have lost it´s voice and won´t call to it´s mother!

So after many hours wrestling, sweet-talking and generally swearing (in the nicest possible way) at our lovely collection of animals, we now eventually have 1 pig, 3 piglets, 2 adult cows and 2 calves at Skalanes. All will hopefully help in some way with the Lupin control and some will become part of our sustainability plan (or "dinner" as we like to call it). 

Only in Iceland...

Only in Iceland would "watering the forest" be considered a "normal" task for a ranger.  Historically before the settlement of Iceland by the norse there would have been scrub birch woodland around the coastal regions. After settlement much of these birch forests were cleared for grazing land or used for fuel and tools.

Now Icelandic forests should not be confused with those that we get in the UK. Up here it takes a great deal longer for trees to reach any significant height.  On the reserve we have some trees that are at waist height, with many of them spreading out across the ground at low levels rather than growing vertically.  The heavy snow fall and icy winter winds have a great deal to do with these very odd growth trends.

At Skalanes we are re-foresting areas of the reserve with tiny saplings that are a mere 6 inches in height, but they will over time help prevent soil erosion, provide a more diverse range of plants and become home to small birds and insects.

We currently have approximately 6000 in trays waiting to be planted. After the dry couple of days that we have had (the fords are really low!) Izzy and I headed over to "water the forest" before we start doing some of the planting tomorrow.

Over the season we will hopefully plant a couple of thousand of these saplings with help from our volunteer groups. More on these wee trees later.

We also still have the team from "Around Iceland on Inspiration" who were mentioned in the previous blog. Riaan and Dan will hopefully be heading off on the next leg of their journey tomorrow having spent 3 nights with us here at Skalanes.  We wish them both well on the rest of their awesome journey.

Below are some recent photographs from the reserve, including one of our latest bird species to turn up...Ringed Plover.

"Welcome to the Forest! Please do not step on the trees!"

Ringed Plover (Male & Female)

"Around Iceland on Inspiration" - Riaan and Dan´s Kayak

Around Iceland on Inspiration!

South African adventurers Riaan Manser and Dan Skinstad are kayaking around the entire coast of Iceland.

Skalanes has become base, for a day or two, to the guys and the documentary team that are filming this epic trip.

Check out the link to find out more... http://www.riaanmanser.com/pages/iceland.php

More info and some photos hopefully at some point soon.

The boys are back in town...

It´s that time of year again when all the lads head back to Skalanes. Today it was the turn of those little gentlemen in waistcoats...the Puffin (Fratercula arctica) or in Icelandic Lundi. This is interesting as in the UK there is an Island called Lundi, which makes you wonder if the vikings called it Lundi as it was full of Puffins.


At Skalanes we now have approximately 25 Puffins on the sea cliffs and we counted another 30 on the sea.  We do not have many areas of suitable slopes for them to make their burrows (yes they burrow rather than making nests on the surface!) so it is unlikely that the population will get much larger than that.


As well as the Puffins we got another new member of the team today.  Early evening Izzy and I got a phone call from Oli to ask if we had eaten. We replied no and Oli asked us if we would like to grab a pizza in town. We thought this sounded like a great idea....oh, but could we also pick up a rooster in a box at his house on the way past!  Most people, using the words 'rooster' and 'box' in the same sentence are talking about Keloggs breakfast cereal. When Oli mentions the words 'rooster', 'box' and 'collect' in the same sentence he does actually mean he has a rooster in a box that he wants us to collect!!


Some ladies will be joining the rooster later in the week to allow us to have fresh eggs over the season and it is likely that one or two will disappear around the time of special events. And thus Chicken Clan will be formed!


Another surprise was the discovery of a Wren by the sea cliffs. Not normally known for living in such an exposed area we hope the hardy wee soul finds a partner. He seems to be living in a boulder slope, so plenty of nice places to build a nest and find insects. (See if you can find him in the photo below)


Some photos from the reserve:

The afore mentioned ´rooster in a box`who has since been christened ´Rupert`as he is the only member of the Chicken Clan who has a fighting chance of surviving the season without becoming soup!

Lundi / Puffin (Fratercula arctica)

The centre at Skalanes

Skalanes, with the Eider ponds in the foreground

The ridge behind the centre is a brilliant
spot to look out over the lower reserve

Try and spot the Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes islandicus)  

 

Fulmarus glacialis