Tori’s View.

I have received word from our volunteers Tori Yates and Vicki Wheeler who have graduated from their course with distinction so congratulations to them both!!! Tori has been kind enough to write a post about her time on the island which I attach below.

From May to July 2008 my colleague, Vicki wheeler, and I worked on Denis Island as Volunteers for the Green Islands Foundation. Sitting now in my flat in Reading, UK; Denis seems a million miles away! Vicki and I worked on two projects on the island:
· a project to re-establish a sooty tern colony, and
· a project to investigate the hermit crab populations on the island their status and habitat associations.
These projects contributed to our MSc studies on Wildlife Management and Conservation at the University of Reading.
We arrived on Denis at the end of May with Professor Chris Feare, a leading expert on the Sooty tern with a long working experience of the species in Seychelles, to set up the sooty tern project.
To try to lure the birds we used a mixture of 3D, 2D models and loud speakers that played the colony noise of Sooty Terns. Similar projects had been undertaken in the past in North America on Least Terns and Arctic Terns but it had never been tried with Sooty Terns before. The experimental site was set up on the south of the island in an area of cleared coconut trees as Sooty Terns nest on the ground. During the two months we were on the island a total of 24 birds landed in the experimental site and exhibited a 95.7% preference for a specific combination of models and vegetation type. These highly significant findings on preference will allow a much more targeted management of the area during the second season of the project. The impact of broadcasting colony noise was vital as 100% of circling behaviour and bird landings occurred when the speakers were playing the colony noise. At the end of the nesting season the site was rearranged into a tighter knit colony using half of the available space. 30 of the models were painted with juvenile markings and these were interspersed with the adult models. This was to make the site look appealing to overflying or “prospecting” birds looking for a nesting site for the next year. (Ed: I was supposed to follow up on this the next month but unfortunately broke my arm and was unable to undertake the work. Occasional observations by others, however, suggest that this reformulation was very successful in attracting groups of birds to the area – see posts of 13th October and 21st September). The Sooty Tern colony experiment will run in 2009 and I am very hopeful that next year more birds will come to the site and a colony will be established.

While we were on the island Vicki and I also undertook a study of the hermit crab populations, so if you visit Denis and see crabs with numbers on their shells, this is not a strange phenomenon, but rather us giving each crab we found a unique number. Little was known about the hermit crabs on the island, and while we were there we found there are three species and they all prefer the native coastal vegetation. Vicki and I had a fabulous time on the island and we were really happy to have helped the GIF and the owners of the island find out more about the wildlife they have on Denis. While we were on the island, Vicki and I worked really hard, going out and sampling crabs or monitoring the Sooty Tern site everyday but we greatly enjoyed the experience and I know that we would both like to return to the island in the next couple of years when hopefully there will be a thriving Sooty Tern colony! We would like to thank in particular Mr and Mrs Mason for their hospitality by allowing us to live and work on their island, and also John Nevill for all the assistance he gave us while we were on Denis.