With the stress of the festivities behind us, it is now time to pay a little more attention to Nature. Let us pick up from where we left off in our last newsletter. The sooty terns chicks were doing well towards the end of August through to the beginning of October, when things started to go wrong.
Where do Bird Island Sooty Terns spend their holidays? Bird Islandés Sooty Tern colony is the best studied in the world, thanks to my own good fortune in having the opportunity to study them over a long period, and to the island’s owners for supporting my research for almost 40 years. Much of what we know about Sooty Terns and their behaviour has been discovered on Bird Island but a major mystery remains - where do they go when they leave the island at the end of each breeding season?
The sooty terns breeding season was really very late this year. The main reason for this occurrence was a shortage of food; Not enough for the birds to produce their eggs. Length of distance between colony and feeding grounds The first hatchlings appeared around the third week of July followed by en masse hatching a week later.