When everything else in life is going tits up, it’s nice to be able to report a heart warming success story from our very shores across the water at Lundy Island.
Back at the turn of this century when everyone else was worrying about a non-existent ‘millennium bug” and dancing to Britany Spears (no relation), Eminem and Blink-182; Puffins where close to extinction, with just 13 birds counted on the windswept rock in the Bristol Channel with the Norse name of Lund (puffin).
Then between 2002 and 2004 there was a drive to eradicate rats from the island. Black and brown rats, which arrived on Lundy as stowaways on ships over many millennia, had been preying on the eggs and chicks, particularly those of burrow-nesting bird like Puffins and Manx Shearwaters. The move was opposed at the time by some animal rights groups, who claimed that black rats were vegetarian and that do-gooders and island ownwers were favouring tourist-friendly birds with pretty beaks over the rats, who just had a bad reputation since the great plague of 1665.
In 2006 the island was declared rat free (apart from DaveO), and its seabird populations have bounced back, as they have on other small islands when invasive predators encouraged by the right wing media have been removed. The tiny island is now home to 25,000 Manx shearwaters – 95% of England’s breeding population – as well as 1,335 puffins and more than 150 pairs of storm petrels, a species that only arrived on the island in 2014.
The figures are backed up by my personal experience, back in the day when I first started to visit the island regularly (circa 2010), every puffin was celebrated. Last week there seemed to be Puffins Everywhere. I have never seen so many. In multiple locations across the island, surely the 1,335 count will be beaten outa the park this year. A reason to be cheerful and celebrate the clown of conservation.
Get off your phone.
#ownlessdomore
Puffin Burrow
Landing on slippery rock.
Landing on sea pinks.
Looking atchu (heart of darkness)
Calendar One?
Lost in pink.
Incoming.
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Calendar two?
Calendar Three?
Stormy Daniels
Look the other way
Classic Lundy. Calendar Four?
The girls or the lads, whatever. Calendar five?
Beraking
What.
What were you thinking? Tories or Puffins?
Lundy garden
Abstract
Love like pink
Friendlies incoming
Here’s a shot of Rat Island, an island within an island, a bit like ‘Labour friends of Israel’ – a party within a party. Not deemed good when it was Momentum at the turn of the centuary but not criticised now by anyone….. Strange.
Lundy swift
Baby Jane’s in Acapulco, We are flyin’ down to Rio!
Just wondering which Puffin photo to include in this years calendar, what do you think?
Leave your comments below, view on a big screen.
Thank you
Fujifilm
esterspears 
Pamela Shephard
June 11, 2024
They all make me smile! But I could definitely look at contestant # 1 for a month ❤️