A rundown of what Rangers Bronwen and Lea got up to on a busy day on the Essex Coast
Following last summer’s successful breeding season in East Mersea, Lea and I have set off on a fine day in June with high hopes for this year’s ringed plover parents.
We started bright and early to avoid the scorching heat and headed to Stone Point, binoculars in our hands.
We headed down the coastal path to check out the ringed plover nest we’d been keeping an eye on. We were delighted to see that mum was still sitting on her eggs! Did you know ringed plovers will lay up to four eggs in one nest? We’d found the nest a couple of weeks ago so hopefully we would be treated to some adorable chicks very soon.
After a brilliant start to our day, we hoped our luck might continue as we carried on down to the spit, a hotspot for oystercatchers this season! Being slightly larger than ringed plovers, they will lay up to three eggs and incubate them for three weeks. We knew of a two-week-old nest here with two eggs. We took a sneaky peak through our spotting scope to find out if mum was still on her nest, but sadly she was nowhere to be found. If a nest is disturbed for too long, the eggs will be exposed to cold or scorching heat and fail. They can also get eaten or taken away by another animal. That’s what makes the work we do so important as we boost their chances of survival by educating people about keeping a distance from active nests. Up close we could no longer see any eggs, so we took down our protective fencing.
Our eager search continued round the corner and back up the steep, shingle spit. Eagle-eyed Lea spotted a pair of ring plovers (or ringos as we like to call them!) and a pair of oystercatchers showing some promising nesting behaviour. We sat and watched for a while whilst still quite far away to see if they would reveal their secrets to us…
Confident with their location, we slowly crept over, causing them to swoop over to safety on the mudflat. After carefully scanning the top of the beach, above the high tide mark we spotted two oystercatcher eggs on a scrape! Lea fenced off the nest while I filmed some content for our social media accounts. We love to share positive news like this with our followers. We fence off the eggs so that visitors can’t trample on them. Working quickly so that mum could come back to her nest, we scanned around for the ringed plovers. Despite not finding anything, we have a sneaky suspicion that there are some more nests here.
With the weather really warming up now we turned to take a slow walk back and, on the way, stopped again to look at our first ringed plover nest. With our spotting scope set up we tried to locate mum when all of a sudden, a chick appeared near the fencing! It looked like a tiny ball of fluff with legs running across the beach. At this exact moment a walker with a dog off lead came close by, but luckily, he acted responsibly and stayed near the water’s edge, with his dog sticking close to him. We think there are more chicks too as mum was still sitting in her little scrape.
Later that day we spotted a bird of prey in the sky, a red kite. It scanned the area of coast. From a farmer’s field nearby, we saw an oystercatcher swoop up and ward off the red kite! We later spotted an oystercatcher sitting in a nearby farmer’s field, so it was probably doing a remarkable job defending a nest. To finish off the day we were delighted to see that the two cygnets from the mute swan pair that lived in the borrow dyke were still around, had grown a lot since we last saw them, and were slowly losing their fuzz.
Overall, a successful day filled with lots of eggs and young! We will continue to check on these, and any other nests that we find. Thank you for your help with giving them lots of space.