Christine's walking & birds blog

There's a photo of a flapper skate on the assyntwildlife website from four days ago, and looking at the sharktrust website I've learnt that this is also called the common skate - although it's a bit confusing as what was formerly known simply as common has now been split into flapper skate and blue skate.

Apparently both have two small dorsal fins, but the space between is longer on the flapper with 1-2 inter-dorsal thorns. I'm not too sure how to tell what's long and what's short, but the image below seems to show the thorns, so I think this is probably a flapper skate.

Using my walking pole as a rough guide, I'd say the skate measured about 4ft 6ins wing-tip to wing-tip.  It's always sad to see amazing marine creatures stranded and dead, but I never pass up the chance to have a good look close-up at something I'm not likely to see otherwise.