A big thank you to all of our volunteers who helped this year on the Seabird Recovery Project stall, and all the residents and visitors who came to join the activities. With your help we raised over £320 to go towards protecting the seabirds on islands for years to come.

Each summer The Isles of Scilly Seabird Recovery Project  delivers fun activities for visitors and islanders at the islands fetes. This year we debuted a new competition to win a gorgeous linocut print of a storm petrel  by Project Officer and local  artist Dr Vickie Heaney, as part of the ‘find the Stormie game’. Onto a map of St Agnes and Gugh, the player put a pin in the location of where they think we found the first Storm Petrel chick of 2015 (the first chick to have survive in living memory due to the removal of rats).  The winner will be announced next week.

We also offered two activities for children: a colouring competition and our famous ‘Storm Petrel Bucket Challenge’.  The Bucket Challenge is always popular with children as, not only do they get to learn about the food chain from ocean to Seabird, but also how hard it is to raise a healthy Seabird chick when there are rats lurking about. The game is set up to mimic a food chain, with the starting bucket full of water representing energy from the sun. The competitors then have to race each other whilst transferring the water in sponges to the plankton bucket, sand eel bucket and eventually Storm petrel bucket. However, there’s a catch, when the rat comes out they have to freeze on the spot so it doesn’t catch them. It’s a fun way to learn about the project, and how we need to protect our important seabirds. We are currently judging the colouring competition and the winner will received a bright orange project hat and feature in our annual newsletter.