Oystercatcher Diary - 2015 Day 7

A fence at last.

Our first week was a huge week of learning.

We spotted the nest with two eggs on 21 September. I had been noticing for a week before that the Oystercatchers had been behaving strangely. They were spending a lot more time in the middle of the beach when normally they only sat just above high tide line.

They had also been seen pecking in the centre of the beach which made no sense as there was no food to be had there.

We later learnt that the false pecking and sitting is part of pre nesting behaviour. They had been building false scrapes until the egg was finally forthcoming. For the second nesting I was able to see this first hand. Our mother would build a scrape crouch over it like she was trying to lay an egg, sit, stand crouch and then eventually go back to the male who was resting on water’s edge and they would mate. Sometimes they would mate again an hour later.

We were very lucky in that the first week the weather was cool, overcast and rainy. It kept most of the people off the beach.

We did have to chase off two boys that were running around crazily with their camera chasing one of the Oystercatchers. The eggs were lucky to survive that. We made it down to the beach and asked them to please stay close to the water’s edge and stay out of the centre of the beach.

When I found the two eggs I first rang Wires. I didn’t know anything about Oystercatchers then but I did know the eggs were not going to stand a chance where they were. In my naivety I rang asking them to come and pick them up and put them in an incubator to hatch. Oystercatchers, however, aren’t chickens. Parents spend around 6 months training the chicks and you can’t just take the eggs and put the chicks back once they’ve hatched. Nothing about an Oystercatcher nesting is easy.

I started internet searches on what to do about Pied Oystercatchers nests, found they were endangered and found mention of a group called South Coast Shorebirds, connected to Parks department and what appears to be Dept of Environment’s main efforts to keep Oystercatchers from going extinct in NSW. From there I got a contact for Royal’s Park Ranger and then Friend’s of the Royal to start up a volunteer group for nest site protection for October long weekend.

That fence going up was wonderful.

We had 2 Sutherland Shire Council representatives here, and Patsy, our Park’s ranger. Between them they brought what they could lay their hands on to do a 200 metre fence line around the nest site.

Simon from South Coast Shorebirds in Ulladulla had delivered three signs that they were able to spare, driving up on a Sunday to Patsy’s home in Wollongong for her to bring up to us today. There were also 5 volunteers including two of our local Wires people.

With our little team we were able to put up the fence line in two hours. We were very lucky our mother bird was on nest as she was more tolerant of people than dad is. She sat there for the full two hours it took us to get our fence up and didn’t move once. We were very relieved as we thought we’d have to be upping and downing tools a lot if the bird kept moving off nest.

It was such a relief to have a fence line up. It worked to keep the majority of people out of the site. Next year, how to better control foxes.

It was quite surprising at how many ignored the rope lines and signs.

Top three noteable exception winners were:

two late teens to early 20s who turned up in a tinny to do yabby pumping. They could have parked the tinny at the end of the fence line but chose instead to park pretty much in front of the where the birds were nesting. Signs were clearly visible at that point. They walked straight through the fence line missing the nest by only 3 metres. Some people that were fishing at the time and who we had talked to about our oystercatchers plight collared them to stop them walking through on their return trip.

a local guy that was annoyed that some of the beach had been closed off. He walked straight through the rope lines missing the eggs by less than a metre.

two late teens to early 20's kayak renters that could not be bothered going around fence lines. They missed the nest site by half a metre.