What lies on the seabed and quivers? A nervous wreck.
July has been busy as you might expect, and it has been a pleasure to welcome old friends back onto the boat as well as making new friends. It is perhaps unsurprising that so many people come back to do a wildlife tour again and again. Neither Nye nor I ever get tired watching the wild world reveal itself in all its many manifestations. Magical is a word we use an awful lot and that sums up the experience of boating around here. Of course we are so lucky because if we do have a trip when there’s not much about and it starts raining, it doesn’t dampen our spirits in the least, we know that a rainbow will appear!
After the excitement of May and June when so many birds and animals were nesting and hatching and foraging, July has seen many changes. The frequent otter sightings of June which we attributed to a good breeding season have become more occasional though not rare by any means. On the day I am writing this we watched an otter cub eating a crab on the shore twenty yards away while a white-tailed eagle flew over us and landed a hundred yards further on, itself being watched by two red deer stags. In the first half of the month the eagle chicks began revealing themselves more and more openly and the nest changed from being a place of concealment amongst the bracken to a platform from which take off and landing could be practiced. Also during this period every movement the adult birds made attracted a pair of kestrels who assiduously and tirelessly harried the eagles while calling out loudly. Lots of photographs and movies were taken!
On the days when the weather was suitable we had some good sightings of white-sided dolphins, also Risso’s dolphins and the occasional minke whale. We haven’t seen many gannets at all this summer but plenty of manx shearwaters during the second half of the month, as well as razorbills and guillemots and for a couple of days only hundreds of puffins with their young pufflings, sitting in the water a couple of miles offshore.
Would it be cheating to put a sighting from the 1st of August into the July blog? Strictly, yes … but we are so excited about today’s trip that we just can’t wait to share … Twelve lucky passengers who were with us this afternoon were up for a bit of splashy action ( whooped on by the kids on board) and we were just nosing our way round one of the islands when a fin was spotted three or four hundred yards away. When you see a fin two metres high it can only be one thing – ORCA !! And there were two of them! Nye not only identified that we were seeing two killer whales but was able to confidently assert that we were looking at the two most famous individuals in the British Isles, namely John Coe and Aquarius, from the West Coast Community of killer whales! Despite the boat rolling and pitching some of the passengers were able to obtain camera footage, which we are absolutely delighted about!
With thanks to fantastic crewmate, Rosie Adey for the wildlife photographs, and passenger Nicole Renold for the Orca video.
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