Celtic broadleaf forests

Thirty-two Leach's Storm-Petrels passed Machrihanish on the 17th, counted from the seawatching point at Uisaed. Few people on this coast ever see one. The bird lives its whole year on the open Atlantic, and the only thing that brings it within sight of the mainland is weather. The Met Office forecast for these inshore waters had westerly winds building to gale force through the 16th and 17th, and a westerly blow is exactly what pushes these birds in against the Kintyre headlands. Uisaed Point has a long record of them on days like this. On the same watch the observer logged 177 gannets and 28 Manx shearwaters moving past. Leach's Storm-Petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous) is a sooty-brown seabird about the size of a starling in the body but long in the wing, with a wingspan near half a metre. The wings are angled sharply at the wrist, the tail is forked, and the white rump patch is usually split down the middle by a thin dark line. The flight is the surest mark at distance: low over the water, bounding and jinking, with sudden changes of direction, closer to a bat or a nighthawk than to anything else that passes this coast. The European Storm-Petrel also comes through here and is easy to confuse at range. It is smaller, with a square tail, a clean solid white rump, and a fluttering, swallow-like flight that skims the surface rather than bounds over it. At sea the bird feeds on the wing. It hovers and patters its feet on the surface, picking up small fish, squid and plankton without ever settling to dive. It finds food by smell across open ocean, which is how a bird this small makes a living hundreds of miles from land. The nearest colonies to Kintyre are the Western Isles, chiefly St Kilda, some 200 kilometres to the northwest, with smaller numbers on the Flannan Isles and North Rona. St Kilda alone holds around nine tenths of the British and Irish breeding population. The birds nest in burrows and come and go only in darkness. Each pair raises a single chick, and that chick fattens to nearly twice its fledging weight before it leaves the burrow in late September. Mid-September gales therefore catch the year's young on their first flights over the sea, along with adults leaving the colonies. Those are the birds that turn up off headlands like this one, and in a hard enough blow some end up stranded on beaches or carried inland. The IUCN rates the species Vulnerable worldwide, and in Great Britain it sits on the Red list. Surveys on St Kilda found the colony there fell by 68 percent between 2000 and 2019, with predation by great skuas identified as one likely cause. The 32 that went past Machrihanish came from that stock, blown within reach of a pair of binoculars for one day before the wind eased.

A flapper skate has been recorded off Arran within the South Arran Marine Protected Area, and it is worth stopping to consider what that animal actually is. This is the largest skate in the world, a flattened, bottom-dwelling relative of sharks that can span more than two metres from wingtip to wingtip. It moves slowly over the seabed, often lying half-buried in sediment, and lays its eggs in tough leathery cases sometimes called mermaid's purses that can take well over a year to hatch. That slow life history, late maturity, few young, long incubation, is exactly what makes the species so vulnerable: it simply cannot reproduce fast enough to absorb heavy fishing pressure. Decades of trawling in the Clyde did just that, and the species profile tool lists the flapper skate as Critically Endangered. The ground it was recorded on is not incidental. The South Arran MPA grew out of the Lamlash Bay No Take Zone, established in 2008 after local divers and fishermen pushed for a patch of seabed where bottom-dwelling species like this skate could simply be left alone. The zone expanded into the wider South Arran MPA in 2014, extending that protection across more of the ground the skate depends on. Marine occurrence records show six sightings of the species in these waters over the past two years, but only one falls within the last twelve months. That is worth reading carefully: a presence record like this confirms an animal was there, not how many exist or whether the population is climbing or falling. The same skate can be logged more than once, and a thinner recent count can just as easily reflect fewer surveys as fewer skate. Still, confirming that a Critically Endangered, slow-breeding giant is still using the exact waters set aside to protect it is a meaningful data point, even if it cannot by itself say whether the MPA is meeting the goal it was built for.

White-tailed Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) — Britain's largest eagle, with a wingspan stretching to two and a half metres — was reported on the Isle of Arran on 26 July, though the iNaturalist record is currently graded needs_id and awaits a second identifier before it can be considered confirmed. The sighting carries weight regardless: seven records have come in from the broader area over the past year, most centred on Islay and Kintyre, and Arran sits at the southern edge of the recovering population — long seen as a natural stepping stone for dispersing birds. A midsummer record here could be a wide-ranging adult or a young bird pushing the range further south. The species was hunted to extinction across Scotland by the early 1900s; its slow return is one of the more striking outcomes of the 1970s reintroduction programme.

Low atmospheric pressure is driving tides 42 centimetres above their predicted levels, compressing the exposed mudflats just as shorebird chicks are fledging and most dependent on access to shallow feeding grounds. The persistent surge has shortened the window between high and low water by hours across multiple tide cycles — a critical constraint when young birds are learning to forage on invertebrates concentrated in the briefly exposed substrate. Lion's Mane Jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) appeared inshore yesterday, tracking the warm, slack water that accumulates behind these prolonged high-water stands. Such appearances often signal the conjunction of elevated temperatures and reduced tidal mixing — conditions that can persist for weeks if the low-pressure system remains anchored offshore.

A meteorological surge driven by low pressure and southwest winds has pushed water levels 27 centimetres above predicted tides in the Firth — an anomaly that on this six-metre tidal range coast threatens to squeeze the already narrow window when Oystercatcher chicks can feed safely on exposed flats. The Firth's enclosed geometry amplifies these surges far beyond what open-coast tidal predictions account for. On the morning of the peak water, levels reached 5.66 metres (MLLW), just 0.5 metres short of the range maximum — leaving the chicks less than an hour daily to forage rather than the several hours they typically have. Survival through the breeding season depends on those longer low-tide periods, and compressed windows like this raise the stakes considerably.

Eurasian Oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) were recorded here deep into chick-rearing season on 27 June. The six-metre tidal range that defines this coast exposes vast mussel beds twice daily — precisely the hunting ground these birds need to feed growing young. Their presence carries ecological weight. These birds are in sharp decline across Britain, pushed out by coastal development and disturbance. Yet the Gaelic tradition held them in high regard, calling them gille-brìghde — the servant of Brigid — a name that speaks to how woven they once were into the fabric of coastal life here. When the tide turns again and the flats flood, it will take the whole estuary to sustain them.