Little Tern Recovery Project
Eccles-on-Sea, Norfolk
The elegant little tern (Sternula albifrons) is the UK’s smallest tern species - weighing no more than a tennis ball - and also the UK’s second rarest breeding seabird (after the roseate tern) with numbers falling each year. They are summer visitors to our shores, returning each April to breed on beaches at fewer than 60 locations around the UK. (photo © Michael Sveikutis flickr cc. license)
One such colony is at Eccles-on-Sea on the East Norfolk coast: it lies on a narrow stretch of shingle beach between the marram grass in the foreground and the offshore artificial rock ‘reef’ - built in 1995 to protect the Norfolk Broads from flooding. This man-made structure has now had a second beneficial effect on the landscape in producing a sand spit that provides an ideal breeding ground for little terns.
As the beach finally falls silent from the cries of the little tern colony a moulted feather in the sand is the only reminder of their fleeting presence at Eccles in 2015. The beach is not the same without them and we hope that they will return to our shores again.
The elegant little tern (Sternula albifrons) is the UK’s smallest tern species - weighing no more than a tennis ball - and also the UK’s second rarest breeding seabird (after the roseate tern) with numbers falling each year. They are summer visitors to our shores, returning each April to breed on beaches at fewer than 60 locations around the UK. (photo © Michael Sveikutis flickr cc. license)