First Puffin Island trip of the year (for me)

Straight back from Australia, jet lagged and after a few hours sleep, on the way to Anglesey and the boat ride to Puffin Island. My job on this first trip was to photograph as many Razorbill rings as I could as part of our ongoing RAS (retrapping adults for survival) scheme. Photographing the rings is a good way of making sure there are no errors with the ring numbers which could skew the results.

Photographing Razorbill legs gets a bit tedious so occasionally my attention wandered to some more artisitc shots.

There seem to be more Fulmars around this year.

The Guillemot ledges are full of incubating birds:

Ubiquitous Puffin:

Razorbill bearing a ring and a sandeel:

The pointy, dangerous end of a Razorbill:

 A number of Razorbills had small chicks:

Adulty Shag. Some birds already have well grown young and we ringed quite a few:

Kittiwakes are also back on the breeding ledges but we'll have to wait until later in the season to see if they're more successful than in previous years:

I also managed to photograph a colour ringed Herring Gull in the breeding colony. I thin this is  bird ringed by the N Thames Gull group at either Pitsea or Rainham Landfill sites so its traveled a fair distance.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks to ring Razorbill & Shag chicks. All in all a pleasant day and  I certainly slept well that night!