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

More bad weather

We thought we were going to get a reasonable day according to the inshore shipping forecast, but woke to full flags and lots of white caps on the sea. I tried to get hold of Graeme before he left Whitley Bay, but was too late. We went down to the Marina to have a chat after we'd got a more detailed weather forecast. The wind was set to drop down at midday, so we resolved to get in touch later.

It's a shame for him, because he has already arranged cover for himself at his business.

We go out later, after the wind has indeed dropped. But it's still a Beaufort force 4 out there. We begin some line transects, travelling south-east past the island (the same as the busy one yesterday, but in reverse). What a difference! We probably saw as many birds as the previous day, but they were feeding much further out from the island - in waters up to 50m deep about 15km from the island. And we saw fish being carried into the colony from these furthest points as well. We did one more leg before giving up on the weather. We were only able to do these transects because we had a following sea, and the remaining legs would have meant ploughing into the waves and not being able to see the terns and survey properly.

It was a tough few hours, but I'm so glad we went out; we would never have found out that the birds were travelling so much further to sea than the previous day.

Why did they do this? Is it because the weather is rougher?

Gratuitous shot of a Sandwich tern with a sandeel