Wednesday 16th August

 A dry, mild, fairly sunny day with a light westerly wind.

It was the light westerly and dry conditions that inspired me to have another go at sea-watching from Frenchman's Rocks this morning. I spent a pleasant enough hour there from 7.30am to 8.30am. As usual when sea-watching off Islay, there is rarely anything earth-shatteringly mega, but, with clicker in hand I stared down the eyepiece of the scope and meditated on the shearwaters passing by, hoping I'd be snapped out of the trance when a different shearwater to a Manxie popped into view. The trance continued uninterrupted for the whole hour as I clocked up 671 very fine Manx Shearwaters, seemingly all heading east and south down into their Irish Sea colonies. With them went a trickle of Kittiwakes - about 120 in all; equal numbers of young and adults which seemed a good sign for a decent breeding year? Single Great Skua livened things up a bit, but best of the bunch was a total of 4 European Storm Petrels passing by quite far out to sea. Only one Fulmar and 6 auk sp. were noted - and of course there were plenty of Shags and Gannets wandering this way and that, but seemingly going nowhere in particular.