Early last night there was hardly a tern on the island so I could sneak in and set the camera up. We assume the Terns had headed out to sea to feed for one last time that day.
We've been hearing a lot of Terns from the cottage quite late at night. I could imagine them being disturbed and getting up on odd occasions but even I was surprised by the amount of nighttime activity!
This chap liked having his photo taken
This chap liked having his photo taken
The camera puts a date stamp onto the photo which also records the time. I got a good picture of what goes on all night. The camera captured over 250 images over night.
After capturing a few pictures of bunny ears the first Tern returned to the colony at 23:03. Birds stayed in the colony until 00:35 when they went off again. They were back 32 minutes later where they hung around for over an hour before disappearing for approximately half an hour again. The Terns then settled down a bit more from 03:00 to daybreak where they went off again.
What were they doing? I can only speculate but one assumes they were taking advantage of the near still moonlit night. They were possibly feeding on Prawns, going on short fishing forays.
Other behaviour noted was watching them digging their shallow scrapes, plenty of Territorial disputes and I had at least two images of them mating.
I'm setting up Eidercam back down at the harbour because when I was making sure gangways were safe from that storm I was surprised how many drakes roost on the beach at Kirkhaven. I'll probably post the images on here no doubt!
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