31 July 2007
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on the island and how the various conservation projects are progressing.If you would like us
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Sooty Terns
The Sooty season seems to have been very
successful to date. The Ministry of Environment are happy with the way
that we operated the cropping of the colony this year and Magella left
mid month as the cropping came to an end. The young chicks in the
reserve are developing well and thankfully for them we have not
experienced any heavy rainfall events which can cause a high mortality
rate for the vulnerable and exposed individuals.
Volunteers
This month we took on two volunteers
from England for three weeks to help out
 with
various projects on the island. Chris and Issac proved to be a great
help in particular with carrying out bird survey counts of the
Common and Lesser Noddy Tern and Fairy Tern populations around the
island. They also tried their hand at the Sooty Tern ring searching
although their success was limited! It really is like looking for a
needle in a haystack when you are trying to find one of twenty thousand
ringed birds in amongst possibly 1.5 million birds! Anyway, after
hours in the colony over a period of a few days they did manage to
catch and record 2 birds, so their efforts were not all in vain! The
boys really got stuck in and helped on other projects too including;
building up rocks around the base of the Casuarina trees so as to
provide safer nesting sites for the ever increasing Tropic Bird
population; photographing the tortoises for identification purposes;
helping the labourers to clear some land (I think that this was a
real insight into how the Seychellois men can work with a machete!).
We really enjoyed having Chris and Issac on the island and wish them
both well as they embark on their university careers later this
year.
Turtle Season
 This
month sees the end of the 2006-7 turtle season and the start of the
2007-8 turtle season. Although we are
recording the turtles there is a little backlog of analysing the
data so that we can present the
information in a useful format for interested parties. I apologise
for this and will do my best in a quiet time to get on top of it and
update you all on how many turtles are coming to lay on the island.
Migrant Count - Since last News Update:
Robbie's weekly count with the
maximum number of birds seen on any day in the month of July is below:
July
80 Frigatebirds, 4 Grey Plovers, 6 Lesser Sandplovers, 4 Greater
Sandplovers, 0 Crab Plovers, 15 Whimbrels, 20 Turnstones, 2
Sanderlings, 9 Curlew Sandpipers, 0 Golden Plover, 0 Ringed Plover, 0
Bar-tailed Godwit, 1 Greenshanks, 5 Crested Terns, 75 Bridled Terns, 10
Saunders Little Terns, 0 Common Sandpiper, 5 Red-footed
Booby, 0 Eurasian Curlew, 1 Red-billed Tropic Bird, 19
Moorhen , 1 Brown Booby, 2 Grey Heron
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