Whiskered Terns Part 1

This year I decided to ring lot's of Terns :)

Attempt 1

Last Friday we were at Grudnjak fishponds looking for Whiskered terns pulli. Tibor did the monitoring of the species so he knew where the colony is. Our job was to get muddy and ring the chicks.. I was pretty excited and it turned out very good:) 98 chicks ringed:)

Prepiring the "boat"

one of the smallest we ringed

one of the biggest we ringed

 Zec took this photos.. More on his flickr.   

Attempt 2

On Tuesday we went to Crna Mlaka fishponds. Goran told us that there is a colony of 50+ pairs.. It's nice to have them again on Crna Mlaka as they breed there last time in 2005 or something.. On our big surprise there were approximately 150 pairs and we managed to ring 108 chicks :) We plan to come back here againa in week or so because there were at least 40 nest with eggs still. 

This time we got real boat as the colony was few hundred meters inside the pond

This chick hatched probably yesterday and the one in the left egg is just hatching

Part of the colony with our boat

Few moments before this photo I got hit by a Whiskered Term :) First time.. I only got hit by YLG in the colony before. This was much less painfull:)

Photos again by Zec, more on his flickr.

Attempt 3

Yesterday we went to Poljana fishponds. This was should be the biggest colony in Croatia with some 600 pairs breeding. It moved from the place it was last year and as I don't know the fishponds we couldn't find the colony :( just few sites where the terms were feeding..It was a bit frustrating because we had big expectations for this day.. Then we find some Terns on the wire (never seen this before)

 and drove in that direction and finally found the colony in the most distant part of the fishponds..

It looked very promising :) 

When we step in the pond it was really no fun because the water was above the waist and mud was above knees so it was really difficult to move. We were even thinking about giving up. When we stepped in the colony we couldn't find the chicks:( there were lot's of nests but no chicks. At the end we managed to ring 20 chicks but it was really hard. The floating vegetation was so dense that we couldn't find big majority of chicks. All in all nice colony but very difficult for ringing..

We have 2 more colonies in plan but about it in few days..