Thursday, July 24, 2008

oxegen 2008

I've given up birding!!
Well, for the time being at least. Seeing as how i'm spending all day every day staring at a seabird colony for a living, the last thing I want to do on my days off is go birding again.
A few weeks back I wandered off to Oxegen festival near Dublin which was absolutely brilliant. MGMT were the stars as they played a packed Pet Sounds tent, i even managed to get in a bit of crowd surfing, a much more satisfying life tick than the King Eider down at Tacumshin would've been.
Embedding music videos in birding blogs seems to be all the rage in times when there are sod all rares about so heres my first foray into stealing stuff off of Youtube.

I was somewhere in the middle of all that lot, and far too busy having a good time to try and film it myself, but I reckon that these videos manage to convey the sense of madness pretty well








The Chemical Brothers finished off with a blistering 90 minute set, which included this sequence in their big screen spectacular which I think has permanantly fucked me up (You need to have worked as a seabird warden to fully understand!!)



On the subject of seabirds ,a quick update on the progress of the Little Terns down here at Kilcoole. We had 72 pairs nest this year. So far we've had 48 chicks fledge, and theres another 60-80 chicks still somewhere between hatching and fledging, hopefully i'll be able to provide a moe accurate figure closer to the end of the season, but as things stand, its definately a successful season, especially compared to the last 2 years, both of which only managed to produce 20-30 fledglings.