Until next time - a farewell from Becca

Hey everyone, it’s Becca again! My three and a half months as LTV on the island are almost up and while I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to Skomer just yet, all good things must come to an end and so this is my farewell blog post (I promise I’m not crying, it’s just hayfever…).

Now that the madness of June is over, the team has been able to turn its attention to other tasks around the island. There’s been a big effort put into the management of invasive plant species over the last couple of weeks, and focus has shifted from counting seabirds to monitoring and ringing chicks. It’s a time of change on Skomer, with many of the seabirds starting to leave the cliffs as their chicks fledge, glow worms and toads appearing on a night, and vegetation rapidly growing taller than me in some places!

One of the Manx shearwater chicks currently being weighed on a daily basis, held by an extremely excited LTV 

I genuinely struggle to find the right words to express how incredible my time here has been - I’ve had so many amazing experiences and learned so much since arriving in April and feel as though the island has really changed me. Doing at least six welcome talks a week means my days of being an anxious wreck at the thought of public speaking are behind me, going a week without a shower no longer makes me feel like a filthy gremlin, and I can walk up a hill a lot faster than I could three months ago!

A lot of people have been asking me what my most memorable moments have been on the island, and there’s been so many of them that it’s hard to pick which are the most notable. A front-runner has to be watching my backpack roll off a cliff edge and drop 40ft down to the rocks below… despite a broken scope, obliterated camera and reinforced reputation of being a massive idiot, it gave us all a pretty good laugh and is an incident I’ll remember for a long time yet (not that anyone will be letting me forget it!). Another memorable moment is an evening spent watching guillemot and razorbill chicks fledging. Seeing the tiny birds hurling themselves off the cliffs into the water below was like a suspenseful TV drama, we all got so invested in their journeys and whether they were going to make it! I also really enjoyed being able to see the island from a different perspective whilst in the RIB doing seabird counts - some parts of the coastline are like something from a pirate movie, and you don’t realise from land quite how many birds are actually on the cliffs around the island.

 

A young razorbill chick with its parents just a few days before fledging

I’m going to miss a lot of things about living and working on Skomer - being able to walk around the island every day, surrounded by fantastic views and amazing wildlife, is something I’ll definitely miss when I’m back home. Seeing puffins on my daily commute has become the norm, so it’ll be quite an adjustment going back to my hometown and seeing a few scruffy pigeons at most! Strangely, I think I’ll also miss the noise of the island. The constant sound of gulls has become almost comforting, and hearing thousands of Manx shearwaters during the night is something I feel very privileged to have been able to experience, even if it has woken me up a few times.

It’s going to be really difficult leaving the island, but I think I’ll find it even more difficult to say goodbye to the friends I’ve made here. Some of my best memories from my time on Skomer have been with the people here, whether that be the movie nights we had in the library, the big potluck dinners we held at the farm or just the general fun and laughter whilst working together. I’ve enjoyed every second of working here and have them to thank for it!

It doesn’t have to be warm for al fresco dining at the farm!

Clutching my bag as I returned to the scene of The Incident

Hopefully this isn’t goodbye to the island, but more of a ‘see you later’… I’m sure I’ll be back to visit before long. So, until next time, thank you for having me Skomer, and I’ll see you soon!