One good tern deserves another... and another...

Tony Murray writes and provides photo:

The plight of the Roseate Tern has been well documented over the last few years. The National Parks Wildlife Service (NPWS) has been involved in wardening the largest ternery in Ireland at Lady’s Island Lake, Co. Wexford for many years now. Since my move from Co. Mayo to Co. Wexford in 2004, this site has fallen under my responsibility as the Wildlife Ranger for South Wexford.

The annual tern wardening project generally involves management of the site, predator control and monitoring. The deployment of nestboxes, ringing and ring reading has also been done at other Irish, UK and French Roseate Tern colonies.


The task has got bigger and bigger over the last few years as our numbers of gulls and terns have increased. Mediterranean Gulls are up to 10 pairs and it has also been good news for all our tern species. Roseates have climbed from 66 in 2004 to over 150 pairs this year. Through ring reading, it is great to show the growth is due to 'home grown' individuals, but however some have relocated here from Dublin.

Our Sandwich Tern numbers continue to grow as well, with 1100 to 1300 pairs between 2004 and 2006. We are now currently just shy of the two thousand mark! Ring reading has again shown plenty of 'home grown' birds breeding but a couple from Inner Farne, Farne Islands, Northumberland and Strangford, County Down have been recorded recently.

Confused Stone Curlew

The rare Stone Curlew breeds in Southern England in the UK and migrates south into Iberia and north Africa for the winter. The best places to see this cryptic bird are on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire and in the Brecklands, Norfolk and Suffolk.

We have just received a report from Linda Jenkinson concerning Stone Curlew EX45756, which was ringed on the 9th June 2010 in Breckland as a chick by the RSPB Ringing Group. Amazingly this bird was found dead at Lindisfarne, Northumberland on 12th December! This bird was definitely going in the wrong direction and this could have been the same bird that was seen on Brownsman Island, Farne Islands, Northumberland on the 1st December. The last Stone Curlew on the Farne Islands was in 1950 so this is a pretty special record.


View Stone Curlew in a larger map

The previous recoveries from outside the UK are mainly from France and Spain but we also have reports from Algeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Switzerland and Morocco. We have had a sighting of a Stone Curlew at Blackdog, Aberdeenshire in May 2002 but this is the first report of a British ringed Stone Curlew in Northumberland!