Monitoring work continues on Canna. Prior to WMIL’s departure in mid December the team + volunteers set up a monitoring grid of 719 stations roughly following the coast of both Canna and Sanday. In addition 25 permanent trap boxes were set up from the pier and out along the shore road. In January, Canna resident, Geoff Soe Paing was given a contract to undertake this monitoring work. This will involve checking the bait boxes once a week and checking the monitoring grid once every six weeks.
Geoff had been given some initial training by Biz Bell prior to WMIL’s departure. Project administrator, Bob Swann, then visited Canna in late January to assist Geoff with the first round of checks, concentrating on the more difficult stretches round the western half of Canna and on the north side. The first monitoring round was completed by 4th February. Checks of the trap boxes revealed no rat signs. 715 stations were checked (4 were found to be missing). Of these none had been nibbled by rats but 532 (74%) had been nibbled by mice. Some blocks had been entirely nibbled away, with copious amounts of droppings being left in the tubes. The photo below shows some of the nibbled blocks. All nibbled blocks were removed and replaced with fresh blocks.
Biz also produced detailed quarantine and contingency procedures to be adopted on Canna. Details of these can be found on the website.
For full details of these measures click on http://www.nts-seabirds.org.uk/plan_q_and_m.aspx
Geoff will be the initial point of contact for dealing with these procedures on Canna.
On January 26th Bob Swann spoke about the project to members of the Lochaber Natural History Society in Fort William. In order to raise local awareness about the project and the quarantine and contingency procedures an article by the project administrator was published in West Word, the local Mallaig and Small Isles community newsletter.
Bob Swann, Project administrator
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