Having spent the past couple of months on my lonesome, I’ve
now been joined by UEA Master’s student Alessandro Gravano for the next two
months. He and I will be carrying out road transect surveys across the study
area in an attempt to produce a revised roller population estimate for Paphos
District.
I’ve also had visits from Dr Chris Hewson from the BTO, and
Dr’s Ines and Teresa Catry (Ines is one of my PhD supervisors) from Portugal,
during which we tried to catch the adult rollers at their nest sites with the
aim of removing geolocators and deploying the new GPS loggers. This proved trickier
than expected early in the season though, as the birds are even warier than
usual when they are incubating. After limited success we decided to schedule a
revised trapping period, when the rollers are feeding chicks and they are a
little easier to catch, in a few weeks’ time.
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| Eggsies |
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| And a few days later... |
Most of the birds are now on eggs, although a few of the
early nesting pairs already have eggs that are starting to hatch. It’s really
important to record the laying and hatching dates/rates at each of the
accessible nests, so this has been taking up most of my time of late. There’s been
quite a lot of disturbance around some of the nest sites, with one of the
Chrysochou nests receiving daily disturbance from an archaeological team doing exploratory
ground works below them! That particular pair seem relatively unshaken by the
experience, luckily.
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| Time Team-type disturbance |
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