Farne Islands

Farne Islands

Today Saturday 18^th we went to Farne Islands. In the morning we just hung out at the campsite doing  “stuff” and then girded our loins for a cool trip in the not too promising weather. Though it was showery on and off for the morning, and looked as though it may pour at anytime we managed virtually all but 10 minutes of our 2 ½ hour trip without rain which was just as well as we didn’t have a cabin on our boat.  The trip out, on Glad Tidings IV was pleasant, at times a bit see-saw like, twisting around a lot on the swell, but not too bad for a girl with a weak stomach. I guess it was about 20 minutes out to the first island, can’t remember all their names, but we just looked from the boat at the first few. The islands are owned by The National Trust and are monitored by their staff for breeding numbers and patterns etc. The islands are only open for about 3 hours a day, different times for different islands, to give the birds a break from disturbance. We also saw grey seals lounging around in the sea, and one pup doing callisthenics  on a rocky small island.

We landed on an island (Inner Farne)  with National Trust staff/ranger accommodation, which was thickly populated with birds, particularly Arctic terns, puffins, shags, and gulls of various sorts.

It was an amazing experience, quite different from the Staffa Island encounter with puffins, much busier and noisier!!! There are 160,000 nesting birds and their chicks on the islands at this time of the year, though our guide did say that thousands of guillemots had left the island the night before. The mums hop off into the sea and call their chicks who plunge off the rocks into the sea to begin their migration, they are only 3 months old and will spend the next 9 months at sea (I’m sure that’s what they said).

Anyway when we landed and disembarked at Inner Farne we were greeted by screaming terns. They had eggs and/or chicks and were very intent on telling us we were not welcome. You couldn’t help but laugh when these poor creatures swooped and dive bombed, pecked at or landed on heads. We had been forewarned and wore our raincoats and hoods to protect our scalps. They were very fierce but didn’t stand a chance against the human invasion. One decided its final strategy to make me beat a hasty retreat would be to do poos all over me, thankfully my jacket kept the guano off the rest of me (pretty wiffy it was too, I guess that’s what you get from a diet of fish!!!).  Anyway we had a wonderful opportunity to get up close and personal with various sea-birds and their chicks, it was really cool.

On the boat trip over Hilary had seen one of the crew showing a young boy how to splice a rope, she was very keen to have a look, so I encouraged her to go and join in. The sailor didn’t have time at that point as we weren’t far off landing, but he promised to show Hilary later, which he duly did. She sat while he explained then he handed the rope over to her to have a go. He couldn’t believe how quickly she grasped what to do, and was sure she must have learnt it before. She has a great ability to observe and then replicate the instruction or action, leaves me way behind, and I’m not entirely stupid.

We had a quick visit of the lifeboat station at Seahouses once we were back on shore. They had had a call out that morning, a dive boat had the emergency channel blocked with a radio problem, so the lifeboat had to go and find it and tell it off.

Most of their call-outs seem to be to rescue half-wits who ignore the warning signs on the causeway out to Holy Island and get trapped by the tide. Looking at the speed of the incoming tide at Scarborough last night I can see why it might happen, but people have to ignore a lot of warning signs to get caught, and they close the causeway for a long time before the causeway is covered. The price the idiots pay is to write off their cars, but I bet the lifeboat crews get really annoyed with them. I notice on the call out sheet at the station it says, “Two people rescued by lifeboat crew from refuge, taken to shore, and handed over to land crew.” Or words to that effect. I know they don’t have to contribute to the cost of rescue (we asked), but hopefully they have something meted out rather than just a telling off.

We had a bit of a poke around in Seahouses before heading back to our campsite at Bamburgh.

Enjoying an icecream in Seahouses

Glad Tidings IV at the dock in Seahouses

Guillemots and cormorants

Learning how to splice a rope

An arctic tern

An arctic tern chick

A puffin on watch

A gull and puffin on shared watch

A cormorant turning its eggs

A guillemot with a sand eel for its chick

The guillemot chick post fish feed

An eider duck, not to be confused with an eiderdown, though they are related of course

A gull

A tern chick and egg

Guillemot and chick

Cormorant and two large chicks

A gull and chicks

A tern coming in for a peck

Another tern baby

The lifeboat "Grace Darling"

After dinner I went for a long walk in the fields. I sort of followed a "public footpath" though it is sometimes hard to work out where they actually go across open fields, or in this case straight into an electric fence (no I stopped in time thankfully) and then very boggy, muddy, cow dungy trenches. I was wet and cold when Igot back, not from the rain but from the wet vegetation all around.

Golden wheat? oats? with purple topped grass in foreground

A field in the evening