Birds do make their nests in strange places!

I was again at the hide today on the Quoile trying to take photos of Common Terns, not an easy job, before meeting my wife at her workplace in Killyleagh for lunch. She works for Irish Spars and Rigging a company that makes boat covers and masts and rigging for yachts. In one of the sheds where they make templates for the covers a Blackbird has decided to build a nest on one of the display covers. This is in a room where the window is always open and for five days a week there can be as many as four people working there.It is totally unconcerned as to the comings and goings of the employees. Lets hope she successfully fledges her young.

I received my quarterly copy of the Wildfowl and Wetlands the membership magazine of the WWT today. They are celebrating 60 years of conservation. They have a good history with geese or ducks that have fallen close to extinction of breeding them in captivity and releasing them back into the wild. For example the Svalbard Barnacle Goose were down to about three hundred birds in the late forties, but with legal protection in1949 and the establishment of a reserve at Caerlaverock in 1957 the numbers recovered to about 2500 in the sixties. It wasnt until the WWT moved in on the reserve and managed the reserve more efficiently that the numbers hold fairly steadily at 25000 now.