Great day on The Island, carrying out a test drove flight to assess disturbance amongst the species currently present (no disturbance behaviours seen, which is great!)
The puffins are back too! But best of all, the weather turned so we hopped in the little Rib and bounced back over the waves, getting absolutely soaked with the driving rain.. only to spot a pod of dolphins around the harbour mouth! Too wet by far to risk getting my phone out for a pic tho..
@sarahdalgulls drone flight? - and how high did you fly? - also any avian flu in colonies this year already for you?
@gernot HPAI - not yet 🤞
@sarahdalgulls hope it stays like that
@sarahdalgulls happy to read anything about - I am flying a bit for photographic reasons mostly, but being inland it is only sometimes I use it for surveys for raptor nests and rather opportunistically, but I have read a couple of papers on disturbance so curious to read more ;-)
@gernot I've been working on surveying seabirds with drones since 2016. There's a lot of knowledge lacking or at least not published (yet!).. generally, most species of seabirds don't seem too bothered by drones, but we are still investigating disturbance responses for the tern species.
For these, it requires a careful approach, but I have found we can get to 30m height without causing disturbance behaviours. Happy to email more info if you are interested in this as a survey technique?