June on Dartmoor

Given that I’ve been unable to update this while I’ve been up on the moor (and I have a lot of catching up to do) I thought it would be somewhat fraudulent of me to give you a blow by blow commentary of my time.  Besides, the early days on the job (with the RSPB) were mostly spent working nights, so I didn’t have the opportunity to capture too many images.  I was part of a team monitoring and protecting a pair of red backed shrike.  Further details and information on how the project fared will be released by the RSPB in due course, at which point I’ll link to it from here.

As I say, a large part of my time was spent patrolling the moor at night, on the lookout for anyone who might want to disturb the birds.  This provided me with a fantastic insight into what it must be like to be a security guard.  At least I was outside – so I had the opportunity to learn the night time habits of foxes, rutting roe deer and nightjars, as well as allowing me to experience a fabulous dawn chorus from the song thrushes, blackbirds, whitethroats, wrens, cuckoos, skylarks, to name but a few.

I met a large number of local birders through the project, some of which gave up their time to come out and help keep a round the clock watch on the birds – more about them later.  Perry from RSPB West Sedgemoor, and the three current residential volunteers from RSPB Aylesbeare, Damian, Rob and Tom, also came out to help out with the shifts.  Nice one chaps.

Highlights from June were…

seeing my first red backed shrike; seeing and hearing the nightjars; trying to work out what that crazy barking is at 3 in the morning (a roe buck); learning to sleep in hour long bursts and at any given opportunity (maybe learning isn’t the right word); seeing a pair of cuckoos getting frisky with each other; and, not having a mobile signal.  One other notable moment, whilst I had a stomach bug at the end of the month, I was on patrol and managed to keep myself from sicking up over someone who stopped me for conversation for maybe 20 minutes while I stood there, not talking, and thinking, ‘must hold it in, must hold it in…’.  How he couldn’t see this in my facial expression I’ll never know.  Thankfully I managed to hold my food down for the duration of the bug, and continue eating at least one decent meal a day.