Little terns at Embleton

On Friday, the wind is still pretty strong from the north-west. We go out anyway, but get completely pasted by the spray and return to harbour after two hours.

We decide that, although we are both pretty tired and looking forward to a bit of time off, we will use the afternoon to do some watches on little tern feeding rates at selected points around their colony at Long Nanny. We watch them feeding up to about 6km south of the colony, and felt pretty confident that they were going no further than this. They seem to spend all their time feeding over the surf in sandy bays, plunging from very high above the sea into water that can be only a few tens of centimetres deep. We see plenty of fish being carried back to the colony.

The southern limit of their foraging trips appears to be the spectacular Dunstanburgh Castle.