Busy day for ringing and a predator caught red handed

Ringing:

Little tern project:

Today there was another observation for the Little Tern project. It was a relatively warm morning with heavy cloud cover. The observation was pretty quiet.In total I saw four little terns flying, but they didn’t land in the fence. There were, however, three common ringed plovers active in the fence for about 20 minutes before they too flew off. The Most exciting thing this morning was a big flock of around 15 Barn swallows flying over the fence which was nice to see.

Later that afternoon, Alix and I went to the beach to retrieve the 15 artificial tern nests and the trail cameras. Of the 15 nests we had set out, we found 13, one of which had not yet been predated. When we returned to the station, we checked to see if the trail cameras had captured any footage of the predators. Only one of the three cameras had some footage. It showed a fox and a crow eating the eggs at the same nest. Below is one of the photos the camera took.

A fox running away after eating the Quail eggs.

At the station: Alix Bortolussi & Jorn de Jong