Pomarine Skua, Red Bank, Ribchester 4 November 2023
4 NOVEMBER and a photo of an adult skua is posted on a Ribchester residents Facebook page! It is apparently on the path between Boat House and Red Bank, my old local patch. I have walked this path hundreds of times! Within minutes Lee Parnell has zoomed along there and confirmed it as a Pomarine Skua! The first ever twitchable in the ELOC area! Sadly it is not in a good state, appearing exhausted. I was there soon afterwards and we figured out what to do. After lots of phone calls, including to a RSPCA inspector who lives in Rib, we were no further forward. No-one cares about wrecked seabirds anymore, maybe owing to the AI risk? So, with no facilities to look after it, we left it to take its chances and it was inevitably found dead next morning. A sad end for a magnificent bird.
Just over a month earlier, on 29 September, Phil Larkin reported a Northern Gannet in his Ribchester garden!!! Another storm-blown seabird and only slightly more regular in East Lancs than the Pom. The gannet’s fate was uncertain, it was captured in Boyce’s Brook and released on the river. It lingered a while but then disappeared. Now this bird had definitely encountered AI, with one balckened iris. Whether or not it was still suffering is not known but its occurrence was following another severe storm so it may have simply been an AI survivor?
Northern Gannet, Greenside, Ribchester 29 September 2023