Ormond Beach, Oxnard California
| Total Nests | Active Nests | Hatched Nests | Failed Nests |
Snowy Plover | 52 | 14 | 35 | 3 |
Least Tern | 16 | 4 | 12 | 0 |
As of the writing of this post we are 16 weeks into the snowy plover nesting season. Snowy plovers have a 6 month long nesting season, so we still have 10 weeks to go. However July always brings a very rapid ramping down of nesting. Least tern nesting season is much shorter. They don't have time to re-nest like the plovers.
Say hi to the plover mom on nest 31, not camera shy
Western Snowy Plovers - Still busy nesting
These are tough little birds! Still nesting are rearing chicks after 3 months. We know from the banded birds on our site that some birds have already had 2 rounds of nesting. That said, they are showing signs of getting tired. The colorful feathers on the males are faded and all the birds are getting very sun bleached. Even our experienced nest monitors are having a hard time telling males from females. We do expect a pretty quick slow down of nesting this month. The number of new nests should drop off pretty dramatically after the 4th of July.
Here is trail camera video we collected from a snowy plover nest that hatched on 6/24/23:
WSP Nest 31 - chicks get busy quick! These babies are about 24 hours old in this video.
California Least Terns Nests: Almost done hatching already!
We found our first tern nests just 1 month ago, and in the past 2 weeks 75% of our very small tern colony has hatched. We've been extremely lucky that nest predation and human vandalism hasn't been a problem. We are crossing our fingers that we'll have fledglings soon.
We have been able to account for chicks from all nests, although this is much easier with a small number of nests. Big colonies have over 100 nests, and we've only had to keep track of 16 nests. We will be watching carefully for those fledglings on this week's survey. We expect in 3 weeks for the tern show to be over. Least terns waste no time starting migration once their chicks can fly!
We put one of our trail cameras on a tern nest in June, but forgot to decrease the trigger sensitivity. These cameras are motion activated and terns are busier than plovers. We collected 1,000's of videos each week. Mostly of the tern parents getting off and on their nest. However we lucked out and caught the hatch before the camera batteries died. Here is some video of the tern chicks. We also caught the adult flying away with half an egg shell, look for it 10 seconds into the video. Both plover and tern parents keep the nest clean during hatching and get rid of anything that might attract predators.
Tern nest #4 hatching, south colony
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