Fair Isle Bird Observatory

Ranger's Blog 2026

June

It’s been another busy month on Fair Isle, filled with guided walks, cruise ships and plenty else going on, including our official opening. Seabird work is still ongoing, with chicks beginning to pop up all over the isle, and several nice birds have also been turning up. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately – buckle up, it’s a long one!

We’ve had a much better spell of cruise ships lately, with all but one making it in for a total of six ships landing passengers. One of the cancelled cruise ships did lead to me Shore Watching instead, and picking up a Harbour Porpoise, so that made up for the cancellation. The Puffins have been much more cooperative recently than at the start of the season, with all the non-breeding birds suddenly arriving at the beginning of the month and becoming a more reliable presence, though some cruise ships still saw lower numbers than others. The most memorable ship day of the month goes to the Ocean Nova, which came in on 3rd in some of the thickest fog I’d ever seen. Kudos to the zodiac drivers for getting everyone in, a pretty impressive effort when they couldn’t immediately find the ship again to collect their passengers after dropping the crew on land, and had to be directed by the captain pointing the ship in the direction they needed to go to make it back to south harbour! Thankfully we could just about see the Puffins on Greenholm from South Green, so still a successful day! The Seabourn Venture was also remarkable in its never-ending stream of passengers coming to see the puffins - I’d led the first few to South Green at 2:15pm and they were still coming at 6pm!


Some extremely foggy conditions made the landing quite an adventure for the passengers of the Ocean Nova, Greenholm was only just visible!

It’s been a bit of a quieter month for guided walks, partly due to the official opening and having the Obs full of people who know the island rather well for a week, but also partly due to some natural lulls in walk interest that come when you have a group of more independent guests who would rather explore on their own. There’s never any predicting how popular walks will be, but as long as I’m not busy with other things they’re always on offer! Recent Puffin Walks have been a success, always the most popular walks I have on offer, and Puffins have been a regular feature on the North Light and Vaasetter routes too. We also had a visit from the tall ship The Flying Dutchman, a ship that came in twice last year and runs almost like a miniature cruise ship, with twenty guests on board. Fourteen of them joined me for a guided walk down to the south, and with many of them keen to visit the shop, some lovely weather, and a tip from hospitality staff Jonnie and Chris that there was plenty of ice cream in the freezer, our brief stop quickly turned into an ice cream break! I’ve been using my guided walks as chance to learn to identify more of the plants and flowers we get around here – I’m getting better, with the help of the app Seek! The isle has been looking spectacular lately with everything out in flower, and it's been interesting watching the variety of flowers changing along my walk routes as we shift from spring into summer.

The first half of June included a lot of plot visits to our Guillemot and Fulmar plots. The Guillemot plots were visited and counted several times, each time with us taking three counts per plot and an average taken to get as close to the true figure as possible - Guillemots are surprisingly hard to count due to the close-together nature of their nesting and it often being tricky to work out exactly how many individual birds are in that small mass of dark brown things you can see! Fulmar plots work a little differently, with three visits and shapes drawn on a photo of the plot to mark occupied ledges. A different shape is used for each visit - I used a circle for my first, square for my second, and a line through the middle for the third. The number of birds present all three times is then counted and we will return later in the summer to mark which ledges have chicks sat on them to get a figure for breeding productivity. Gannet productivity monitoring is progressing well, with a good number of birds now with chicks and several more looking suspiciously like they may be hiding chicks from me. Another big June job is Bonxie nest mapping, walking up and down the Bonxie breeding areas to find nests to allow an accurate count of the breeding population. My areas for mapping were Byerwalls and Hoini, two fairly low-density breeding areas with four or five nests each. Generally I will defend the Bonxies swoopy nature, citing the fact that they are just very protective parents, but one bird on Hoini caught me by surprise as I was stood over its nest logging its location when I felt a large thwack to the side of my head. This was followed by a few seconds of my ear ringing and about 20 minutes of numbness making me briefly question my usual stance that Bonxies really aren’t that bad. Alex, Tom and Luke have also been doing plenty of auk colony work, though I’ve been busy with other things a lot of the time so have only managed to join them for a morning of Puffin colour ringing so far, where we caught three birds.


One of my Gannet visits resulted in the discovery of a new Pirate Lamb on Dronger, which many were pleased at the news of due to the recent loss of Pirate Sheep, who had roamed the area around the Haven for the past decade.

I’ve completed a few more shifts in the Museum, though my shift on the 19th was cancelled due to this being the Museum’s 40th anniversary of opening, and it being open for celebrations later on. After almost being late due to the sighting of a couple of Orca (which I very briefly saw), it was a lovely way to end the afternoon with the Museum open for all to come and celebrate (with some Prosecco of course!), and testing the limits of how many people can fit inside at once. Incredible to think how it was once the community hall, and with an island population bigger than today’s - social events must have been rather cosy! It was lovely to see such a great turnout for the event and to hear Anne speak of her years running it. I was appointed photographer for the event, so spent my time balancing a glass of Prosecco in one hand and my camera in the other.

The museum opening fell amongst events organised for the Observatory grand opening, including a talk by islanders Dave Wheeler and Jimmy Stout covering an amazing array of photos they had taken or acquired over the years, and another by author Ann Cleeves the following evening. Saturday 20th brought the opening itself, though my day began with meeting a cruise ship and taking the passengers up Buness to see the Puffins, then clock-watching to make sure I was back at the Obs in time for the first opening speeches of the day. Opening speeches by Ann Cleeves and director Karen Hall and the plaque unveil were done twice, once before lunch for those who had day-tripped in for the event, and once again in the evening for all the islanders. Lunch was an impressive buffet spread put together by the kitchen team, featuring two of my favourite things – Nair’s homemade doughnuts and a giant wheel of Brie. Dinner was buffet leftovers, then we were treated to another buffet alongside a rather impressive FIBO logo cake by Eileen and Neil in the evening. The evening also saw the official opening of Kenny’s Bar, with a speech by Deryk Shaw and Ian Best. I was in charge of filming all of the talks and speeches on a fancy little camera belonging to Marie, a job that mostly went well until I realised the camera was in completely the wrong place for the bar speech, leading to a rather chaotic minute of film as I tried to make the best of the situation. The weekend concluded with a Sunday evening FIBO-themed quiz written and hosted by me, with six teams battling it out for the prize of a box of Heroes and some Tunnock’s Teacakes. The results were incredibly close, with only 3.5 points separating first and last place, but a team consisting mostly of Obs staff took the victory, helped considerably by the art round in which they gained an extra five points after their depiction of the Obs was voted the winning piece by my family, who were judging from afar.


Our rockpool school session findings – Sea Urchin, Grey Sea Slug, Cushion Stars, Shore Crab with its recently moulted shell.

Since my last update, I have completed two further sessions with the school. The first was a rockpooling session, something we try and do fairly often and that the kids (and I) thoroughly enjoy. This was the first school session where we were joined by nursery pupil Brodie, and he did a great job navigating the slippery rocks. We found a few nice things, including several Grey Sea Slugs, a couple of soft-shelled Shore Crabs who had just completed their moult and were waiting for their shells to harden up again, several Small Cushion Stars, a few Brittle Stars and a Sea Urchin, whose wiggly tube feet we could see moving around under the water. Luca and Ander also found a fish in a large but shallow pool but unfortunately it evaded capture and refused to give anyone good views, so we had to accept it as one that got away. Our second school session of the month was inspired by NASA’s Landsat programme, where you can type words and get them back in satellite images that look like the letters (you can see what I mean here: https://science.nasa.gov/specials/your-name-in-landsat), so we set off on the northbound road towards Furse and kept a close eye on the surrounding landscape to see if we could find the alphabet. I was once again joined by all four children and they all got quite creative, with letters found in the sea, heather, wool, and shapes of pools among other things. We then returned to the Obs to import the images into my laptop and make the kids names from our new Fair Isle alphabet. There are plans to use this in the school for name labels and to have the full Fair Isle alphabet up around the walls of the nursery!


Our Fair Isle Landsat alphabet.

Talks this month have run slightly differently to usual due to the opening week talks, but the month began as usual, and Luke and Tom both did a great job of their first talks of the year - Luke on The Fair Isle Birding Year and Tom on Migration. We’ve also had more wonderful guest talks, the first being from Ava Jenkins of the Darwin Tree of Life Project, who was visiting to take blood samples from new bird species in order for the project to sequence their genomes. We managed to catch her a few birds whose species were new to the project, including Bonxie, Fulmar and Crossbill, so it was a very productive visit for her! Our next guest talk was by visiting birder Ollie Metcalf on some acoustic recording and conservation work he carries out in the Amazon Rainforest, complete with videos and sound recordings of some of the species he comes across there. It was then over to the opening talks for the following week, and the month ended with Alex starting the Ornithology team's talk rotation second run-through, and a guest talk In Defence of the Fulmar by Jonnie, which had him making quite the entrance dressed as a judge!

Summer can be a quiet time for birding, but it can also bring some nice surprises with it, and we’ve had some great birds this June. The month began with a Golden Oriole around the Kirn o’Skroo. Brief attempts to see it on the way back from a guided walk to North Light were unsuccessful as it was a rather mobile bird, but I was pleased to catch up with it later on. A Bee-eater almost missed by all of us on the Ornithology team as we’d been trying to catch some Bonxies for GLS tag retrieval brightened up the middle of the month, and a Serin I caught up with on my way back from a guided walk with some guests to South Light (where they stayed for lunch) was a new bird for me. Unfortunately, I narrowly missed the Long-tailed Skua due to being out Gannet productivity monitoring and despite my efforts to pick out the bird on the airstrip from the top of Lerness, the heat haze was too much and with the plane due in imminently, I had to accept defeat. However, the Trumpeter Finch at the Kiln o’Skroo more than made up for this, as despite initially missing it, I got some great views when I returned later on. My other birdy highlights of the month were an afternoon ringing wader chicks, mostly Lapwing, but also my first Redshank, and stepping out of the shower one morning to see my phone ringing to inform me that they had just caught a Nightjar and it was mine to ring. I was dry, clothed and in the ringing room within 4 minutes!


Wader chicks are always the cutest little bundles of fluff (left Lapwing, right Redshank)

I’ve been spending my free time getting as much lamb time in as possible before they’re all grown up, which meant helping bottle feed the lambs at Burkle at every possible opportunity before the milk powder ran out and they were completely weaned. I quite enjoy working with livestock, and part of my most recent afternoon off was spent helping the Shaws clipping some of their sheep. I did a sheep and a half, taking my total sheep clipped ever up to 4 – bring on the hill caa and more clipping! Clipping unfortunately coincided with the finding of the Trumpeter Finch, with us all halfway through sheep at Del’s announcement of its finding, so once we’d finished it was a quick drive up to North Light where the bird had since gone missing. Luckily we all managed to catch up with it later on, on a lovely evening for a twitch at North Light.

See you all next month!


Me giving Peter Rabbit, the rescued abandoned hill lamb, one of his last bottle feeds.

May

May has been a busy month with plenty to keep me occupied, with steadily increasing numbers of guests, cruise ships, a visit from my parents, and all sorts else!

One of my first jobs at the start of each month is going round the isle and checking on all of our biosecurity boxes. With this month’s check closely following news of a rat on Mousa, I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would not suffer the same fate, but luckily, we were all clear. The biosecurity monitoring is done using chocolate-flavoured wax blocks, and any sign of rodents is recorded. Here, our resident mice like to have a nibble at the blocks, but they aren’t cause for any concern.

I’ve packed in a good number of guided walks in the past few weeks, covering all of the routes I offer and with a few evening Puffin walks. The Puffin walks have varied from no birds on land to lots coming in as soon as we sit down to wait, with the latter leading to lots of happy guests! A few of my longer walks have been particularly memorable for falling on days when we’ve had good birds turn up, including one where a Bluethroat and a Western Subalpine Warbler at Barkland were located either side of a wall, both visible at the same time from where we stood, and at one point were both in the same ditch! Another particularly notable walk day was the day the Northern Parula turned up. I had been about to leave with a guest for a guided walk to North Light when Tom put out the news, so the walk quickly turned into a twitch followed by a walk around the south-west coast instead, with plenty more nice birds to see, including a Cuckoo that then spent the latter part of the afternoon (after I’d gone back for seconds of the Parula) teasing me by landing close in front of me but never giving me a chance to photograph it!


An impressive turnout for a Puffin walk, luckily coinciding with an impressive Puffin turnout!

We’ve also now had the first few cruise ships of the season, though of the six that have been so far, only three have actually managed to land passengers – not a great success rate this early on! I always enjoy cruise ship days, so it’s good to have them back again – they’re a great opportunity to chat to people from all over the world and to really test your Fair Isle knowledge when passengers ask you questions such as how many vehicles are on the isle! The Puffins have turned out in varying numbers each time to delight the cruise ship passengers, many of whom were seeing them for the first time. Each time a ship comes in the Hall and Museum open, with the Hall set up for knitwear and artwork sales, and with a delicious array of cake available (always my first stop after a cruise ship puffin walk!) alongside hot drinks. There’s always a lively buzz about the Hall when its full of cruise passengers, and this year has been particularly nice as the Observatory now holds a stall selling merch, where I will go and help Ruth with questions and sales once I have finished with Puffin walks and nabbed a slice of cake.


This ewe had a lot to say about the arrival of the first cruise ship of the year...

I have completed three sessions with Fair Isle Primary School so far this season, and all three have been a big success with the three kids in the school. Our first session included a walk around the south of the island during which I had set the children the challenge of finding something beginning with every letter of the alphabet, whether it be birds, plants or other parts of nature. They put in a very good effort, finding things for all but six letters of the alphabet, and even managing some of the trickier ones! Our second session focused on bird ringing, with the kids and their teacher Jonathan joining myself and our Head of Ornithology Alex for a trap round. The school’s headteacher was visiting at the time so she also joined us, and it was great to be able to introduce her to some of the work done by the Observatory. After pushing the traps we returned to the Obs where AWs Tom and Luke had opened the nets in the garden, leaving us with five birds (two Chiffchaffs, two Blackcaps and a Sedge Warbler) to show the children being ringed and for them to get to release afterwards! Our most recent session was a beach clean of the school’s adopted beach at Muckle Uri Geo in collaboration with FIMRO, with data collected for the Marine Conservation Society. 4kg of litter was collected, made up of 103 pieces, by a very efficient team of 20 volunteers!

This month has also seen me take up a new role on the island, learning the ropes to be able to open the Museum. Fair Isle has an impressive history for such a tiny place, and there’s a lot to learn! I now have a regular Friday slot opening the Museum for an hour and a half. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far but I’m already starting to learn a little more each time and become more confident in what I do know.


Choppy seas by my Gannet plots!

Seabirds are slowly starting to occupy more of our time as the first species have begun in this past month to settle down and start to lay eggs. Each of us on the Ornithology team has a species we carry out breeding productivity monitoring on with regular checks. My productivity species is Gannets, of which I have 5 plots totalling around 300 nests that I check every 7-10 days. I’ve completed three visits to my plots so far this year, and it’s a little early to be able to say how they are doing, but I have seen a good few birds on eggs.

Something else that has also begun for the season is our regular talk schedule. Our first talk was on 19th May, and the plan is to continue with talks either by members of the Ornithology team or by guest speakers occurring every Tuesday and Friday evening after Log. So far, we’ve had three talks, the first week starting with Alex giving what will be his regular talk on the Seabirds of Fair Isle, and a guest talk by artist Kat Owens about her project Entangled and Ingested. Kat’s talk focused on the effects of plastic on marine life, and her artwork uses single-use soft plastic to create life-size works of marine species that have been found entangled in or having ingested plastic, including several whale species making for some very large pieces of work! The talk was followed by a workshop in which those who attended the talk were able to contribute to Kat’s biggest piece of work yet, sewing plastic to the fabric backing of a 10x6ft portion of what will be an 80ft long Blue Whale! I have also delivered my first talk of the year, one on the history of FIBO that I’ll be giving on a regular basis. I usually enjoy giving talks, and once I’m in the flow I tend to get quite into them, and this one was no exception!


An example of one of Kat's pieces, a Fulmar made out of single-use plastic.

Other birdy highlights not mentioned include Fair Isle’s first record of Spoonbill, two individuals found by Tom as they landed, and which stayed on Da Water only just long enough for us to make it with a few guests from the Obs! The past week and a half have been exceptional, with several Bluethroat, a Red-throated Pipit found by Luke at Field just as I was passing on the way back to the Obs after a cruise ship, a Thrush Nightingale found by Tom at Setter, and of course the Northern Parula deserves another mention, bird of the season so far, and what a run of good finds Tom is having!

I’ve not fitted in many Shorewatches recently, and those I have managed have been pretty quiet, though one afternoon immediately upon my return to the Obs after completing a couple of watches, Luke, who was just heading out, picked up a large pod of Risso’s Dolphins heading for Buness. The timing was slightly frustrating, but I couldn’t be annoyed for long when I realised how slow they were moving and that I could catch them off of Buness! This led to a pretty incredible and unusually long encounter with a nursery pod complete with several calves! The best views of Risso’s I’ve had yet and a big highlight of the month for me. A visit from my parents and getting to spend a few days showing them around the island I’ve told them so much about was also welcome – they found Fair Isle a little cold and hilly being used to very flat Norfolk but loved it! They also helped me test-run the Fair Isle Monopoly I spent my free time working on last year, which is now playable in the Obs bar! Since the last update, we have also carried out both our BBS surveys for the year and got the Oysterplant fence up by South Light with the help of housekeeper Maebh to protect the Oysterplant from the sheep, plus I’ve had my first T-shirt weather days of the season! The next few weeks should bring a bit more seabird work, more cruise ships, and the first evening talks for the Assistant Wardens, rounding off the first of each of our four regular talks!

See you next month!

April

Hi everyone! I’m Carla, I was Ranger last year and loved it so much I’m back again for the 2026 season! It’s great to be back on Fair Isle, and within a day of being back it felt like I’d never left. We have the whole staff team from last year back which means we’ve all settled back into a routine very quickly, running like a well-oiled machine even after a few months apart.

After being stuck on Shetland for two days (staying with Karen, one of the FIBO directors who generously fed and housed AW Tom and I for the time we were stuck while her new puppy kept us entertained!) and fearing not making it over due to a lot of snow in the morning, it was a relief to make it back and to reacquaint ourselves with the lay of the land with a walk around the south road loop. A Greenland White-fronted Goose by Skerryholm was a nice start to the season.

So far, it’s been a busy few weeks of mostly indoor jobs for me, following on from some display board content I put together at the end of last season, so I’ve spent several hours guillotining and laminating and guillotining again before sticking Velcro to the back of each piece of text or photo. My next job was arranging these Velcro-ed parts on the boards then walking away quickly before I can scrutinise how straight (or not as the case may be) each element is. I’ve also been working on some talk slides for the coming season as we work on getting a regular talk schedule up and running, in between other odd jobs.

It’s been a windy start to the season, making for a slow start bird-wise, but also limiting opportunities for outside jobs. On the few calm afternoons we’ve had, it’s been nice to get out and help our Assistant Wardens, Luke and Tom, with some jobs around the isle, including translocating some irises to the Obs Scrape that had been dug up from the Walli Burn to prevent it clogging up, and fixing the catching box on the Double Dyke trap after a disastrous escape by a Black Redstart a day earlier. We’ve also partially rebuilt the Gully trap, a big job that took several afternoons, and spent a couple of afternoons spreading seaweed on the Skadan crop in the hope that it will fertilise the soil and help the crop to grow with more success than last year. Some calm mornings offered an excellent opportunity for Tystie surveys, the east coast one morning and west coast the following morning – two very early starts in a row for the Ornithology team! Tystie surveys are slightly unconventional in that they are carried out by shouting down cliffs. This encourages the birds out of their deep and inaccessible nesting cavities down the cliffs and onto the water, where they sit patiently to be counted, the large white patches on their wings standing out against the sea surface. In terms of birds, the highlights so far have been a White-billed Diver and a Woodlark, and I was also very happy to get to ring my first Snow Bunting!


A view well worth the 5am alarm during the west coast Tystie survey!


Snow Bunting in the hand, one of my favourite birds and one I was very pleased to get to ring!

In terms of more Ranger-y outdoor jobs, I’ve done my first biosecurity box check and my first Shorewatches of the year. I’m pleased to report that we remain rat-free, and my first venture to the South Light shorewatch site (somehow I only did Buness shorewatches all season last year) resulted in a Porpoise sighting! I have also completed my first few guided walks of the year, including testing a new walk route up Vaasetter. This is a part of the island I don’t venture to often enough, and I forget how good the view from up there is, besides it’s also pretty cool to see Sheep Rock up close! I’m excited to get up there a bit more this year, if I can work out a route around the Bonxies in the summer!


One of the best views over Fair Isle, from the top of Vaasetter

We’re having a bit of a competition between the obs staff this year – who can see the most bird species this season? Our whiteboard in the staff corridor is covered in some very long tick lists, one for each member of staff, and when something new is spotted a queue often forms as everyone heads to update their list. As expected, the wardening team have begun leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, their mornings spent on census giving them a distinct advantage. Though my list is slowly growing, I’ve still got some catching up to do – bring on more guests and more guided walks!

Puffins have been returning in dribs and drabs, with the first on land of the year spotted on 9th April, and numbers of other birds such as Wheatear and Bonxies are climbing. I’m eagerly awaiting the first Arctic Skuas of the year, my favourite Fair Isle species, and due any time! It also won’t be long before the first cruise ship arrives in early May – here’s hoping I keep up my puffin success rate of last season where I managed at least a couple of puffins for every ship that came in!

See you all soon for another update!