New boat

Two boat owners tendered for the contract to follow terns, which is no small deal given that the process is somewhat off-putting. We gave both of them a piece of the cake. Now it was Paul's turn of Farne Island Divers. His boat is a Humber and about 10m long with two 225 HP engines at the back. That's a lot of grunt!

A bigger RHIB and a new antenna

We also received a new antenna to make it much easier to try and radio-track terns. We managed to detect one of the birds in the colony, but still aren't having any success detecting them at sea.

We found the boat to be very smooth at speed, especially given the calm weather, and found it very easy to follow Sandwich terns, but managed some complete runs for common and Arctics as well (i.e. watch it leave the colony, feed and take a fish back to the nest site). We noticed something - if we spend a bit of time trying to only follow birds that we see leaving the nesting areas, we seem to get more complete runs.

Sandwich tern with large sandeel. Note that it has started to moult out its crown feathers