Toby Carter's Monthly Nature Blog

Here’s the second instalment in this blog series, where I’ll share my nature experiences over the past two months and what I’ve been up to.

Starting the summer off, here in the UK it has been an interesting season with the extremes of weather from hot, 30-degree sunshine to what is currently very unsettled, wet weather. In the last blog I ended it with saying my main aim over these summer months was to go out & find some Nightjars, been lucky enough to see this awesome species on three occasions throughout June/July. I’d been down in Dorset for an RSPB Optics Day at RSPB Arne during mid-June and joined a friend of mine on a nearby heathland to help a team monitor & ring Nightjars. This was a great chance to put the DTI 3 Gen 2 to the test, when you weren’t getting bitten alive by midges. We had brilliant views of several Nightjars along with a pair of Hobbies & roding Woodcock, we were even lucky enough to catch a Nightjar which was carried out using the correct licenses with the project looking at feeding patterns and understanding more about this cryptic species.

Major highlight of the summer was heading upto the Northumberland coast for a long weekend, the main aim was to spot the rare American Black Tern which has spent the last few summers at an Arctic Tern colony but despite multiple visits there was no sign… until we got home which was just typical. But thankfully there was still plenty to go & see, highly recommend the one hour boat trip around Coquet Island from Amble. We saw 1000s of Puffins amongst many other seabirds although the highlight was seeing the rare Roseate Terns that breed on this island. Sadly due to bird flu seabirds especially are being hit hard and colonies such as Coquet Island are under serious threat of being wiped out.

The main summer event was of course Global Birdfair, want to say thank you to everyone that came over to the ZEISS stand, it was great to see so many people which gave us the opportunity to showcase how good our optics & thermal range is! Even though the weather was in full Glastonbury Style, lets hope for a calmer Global Birdfair in 2024 on the weather side.

Since booking this holiday last year I’ve been counting down the days & now it is only round the corner, a full week on the Scilly Isles to go on pelagics out into the sea. The main aim of these will be to spend many hours out at sea, throwing fish guts overboard to attract seabirds with a particular interest in species such as Wilson’s Petrel, Corys & Great Shearwaters & in the next update I’ll be sure to say how well this holiday goes.