And back to Alderney

Taking a break from birds for a moment, these furry critters were everywhere along the clifftops in Alderney a couple of weeks back. They're the caterpillars of the Glanville Fritillary, a very rare butterfly in the UK (found only on the Isle of Wight), but which is doing well in Alderney. Those startlingly red eyes stay with you, don't they?

An island of Wheatears

Wheatears are among my favourite British birds, but until my visit to Alderney, I'd seen relatively few this spring. I'm not sure if that's because passage has been slow because of the cool weather, or just that I haven't been in the right places at the right time. But anyway, Alderney more than made up for it. Longis Common regularly had 10 or more, including Greenland-race birds, while we kept coming across them elsewhere on the island.

Birders are always delighted to hear that the name has nothing to do with wheat, and actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'hvit oers', literally 'white arse'. They were nothing if not observant, those Anglo-Saxons, and they didn't like to mince their words.

There's more on Wheatears (and one individual Wheatear in particular) in my book, A Sky Full Of Birds, available now.

More from Alderney

 

Alderney isn't just about Gannets and other birds. In the spring, it's just a very pleasant place to be, walking along the cliffs or beaches. The spot above, on the south coast of the island, is typical – if Peregrines drift over, that's a great bonus, and you can always watch the seabirds, but the scenery's worth it in its own right.

Throughout our stay, we were at the Braye Beach Hotel (below), which as well as being very comfortable and geared to birders and other wildlife-watchers, is nicely placed for early morning birding. Ringed Plovers and Whimbrels drop in on the beach itself.

And what about that other wildlife? Well, up on the cliffs, Alderney has a good population of Glanville Fritillaries, a butterfly otherwise found only on the Isle of Wight in the British Isles. It was too early for them while we were there, but their caterpillars are great – black, hairy and with vivid red eyes.

Gannets on Alderney

Last week, I was co-leading a Bird Watching Magazine/Avian Adventures readers' holiday to Alderney and Normandy, with Martin Batt, whose work with the Living Islands project on Alderney has done an awful lot to put it on the birding map.

It's a great place to try your first birdwatching outside the UK mainland, because it's small and manageable (you could easily do it all on foot or by bike if you wanted to), but also gets a good variety of birds.

These can include overshooting migrants that would otherwise only be seen on the French mainland, and large numbers of other migrants on their way north to Britain (and beyond).

And then there's the seabirds. Puffins breed on Burhou, just offshore, as do Storm-petrels, and there are good colonies of Razorbills, Guillemots and Shags. But best of all, at Les Etacs, you can view one of the most accessible Gannet colonies in the British Isles.

Thousands of these glorious birds – we have a large proportion of the world's population of them – crowd onto the rocky cliffs, and there's a constant coming and going as they fish the surrounding seas, although they range as far afield as Cornwall and the Thames Estuary.

I'll be posting more from Alderney and northern France over the next few weeks, but you can also read more about the island's Gannets, and those around the coast of Britain, in my book A Sky Full Of Birds, available now.

Quiz time

One for you birders out there - what species is this chap?

I photographed it during a recent trip to Alderney, where a new bird observatory and ringing station has been set up. Among the remarkable ringing records they had even during the few days we were there, this was one of the oddest.

Answer to follow soon, along with more on the trip.