The present

A swan attacking on Cork Lough

That brings us up to the present day! I am now living in Cork; awaiting my Masters degree (MSc) in Marine Biology to start tomorrow. I have been here for two weeks already; but I have been reading a lot of scientific papers on the acoustics of Delphinid species, and getting my head around how exactly to tackle my research project. I shall be updating you on my progress over the next year!

The return - final

A popular surfing beach on the Peninsula that I called home.

My final stop, was in County Mayo, Republic of Ireland. I was providing staff holiday cover for the Coastal & Marine Research Centre, with an office based in Belmullet. In the two weeks that I was there, we only had good enough weather for two field days; cliff top visual scans using a theodolite for tracking. On the other days, I was in the office repairing databases, and providing help with Cpod data analysis. I may also be centering my Masters degree's final project on the analysis of CPOD data from this site. More on that later.

The return - Part 2

A Common Seal pup at Dingle Seal & Wildlife Sanctuary, Ireland

The next stop this summer was Dingle, Republic of Ireland. I was again volunteering with the Atlantic Whale Foundation; but this time not in Tenerife. This project has only just started up, and was understandably a lot smaller. At the peak, there was 8 volunteers, which is quite a contrast to the 70 in Tenerife. Most of our time was spent working at the Seal Sanctuary on the outskirts of Dingle. This is a totally volunteer run sanctuary, that is open year round; caring for abandoned and injured Common seals during the summer, and then Grey seals during the autumn / winter. Alongside this, some of us also did visual observations from cliff tops, and surveys for daubenton's bats.

The return - Part 1

Photo of Bottlenose dolphins from the cliff top.

So; it has been a very long time (around 2 years) since the last post. Yet again, I had forgotten about the existence of this blog! I am determined to carry it on this time, now that I am actually more involved in the animal world. I have been up to a fair bit since the last post. I have spent this summer fulfilling several placements. The first in Cromarty, Scotland; working with the University of Aberdeen at the Lighthouse Field Station. I was carrying out research for a PhD student, doing visual observations of Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) from a cliff, which was used in conjunction with a Cpod to look into the effects of shipping from the oil rig repair station in Nigg bay, on the behaviour of the dolphins. Whilst here I also managed to help analyse Cpod porpoise recordings from another project, help with photo-id of birthing common seals at Loch Fleet, and also participate in Photo id surveys of Bottlenose from the survey boat. While here, we also saw a juvenile minke whale; which was around 4 metres long (Video can be seen here ).