They said it would be tough

And now we are entering into the breeding season I can confirm that they were right, but it is not the breeding season itself that makes it tough, but the Seychellois opportunists that exploit it. I am talking about poaching and the collection of sooty tern eggs for Seychellois consumption.

This is so far away from what we are used to back in the UK, the scale and industrial nature of the poaching here has taken me aback. On Aride there are 350,000 pairs of sooty terns and they breed right across the island, on the rocks, in the woods, on the paths, in fact on any bit of spare ground they can. They are beautiful birds, with their distinctive and immaculate black and white plumage, they are quite a large tern and one built for long distant flight and life at sea. They return to the island to breed each year and each year they are persecuted here in the Seychelles for their eggs.

It is times like now that you really experience what living on a small remote island nature reserve is like; we are chiefly here for the protection and preservation of the island and all the wildlife that uses it. Now that protection and preservation may come in many forms, from increasing awareness in the local community and schools, to raising money to keep paying the rangers’ salaries, but of course it is also in our physical actions on the ground. Back in the UK the protection that a nature reserve of this calibre would receive would mean that people even sneezing in the wrong fashion could be prosecuted. But here on Aride, when even something as detrimental as poaching is occurring, we are on our own. In preparation for this time, we met with the local police last April, wined and dined them and talked about the way forward. Their reply was how many eggs do you think you can get us this year? So I don’t exaggerate when I say we are on our own.

Poachers arrive in groups and land on the island at all times of day and it is quite a lucrative business. Each egg may fetch 2 to 3 rupees, now a teacher may earn 3,400 rupees a month, so it doesn’t take a mathematician to work out collecting a couple of thousand eggs is a good nights work, with only the boat fuel to pay for. It can be a risky business due to rough seas and difficult landings on the rocks, but these men have been brought up on this work and know the island like the back of their hands.

The first sooty tern egg was laid 1st June, now at the 14th, there is evidence of the mass poaching that has gone on, large swathes of the island have been stripped. Then birds will re lay and so in two to three days of clearing a section the poachers will be back again and so it goes on until the birds can lay no more.

At the moment all we can try to do is to gain evidence to illustrate the scale of the problem, to do this we are undertaking poaching patrols dawn and dusk to record the boats and number of poachers we see. It is times like this that 70ha of island made up of 90% hill and rough terrain, feels like 570ha, there is no one vantage point from which you can see all approaches. Which also makes things easier for the poachers; not that they ever seem to really worry about been seen. In order for them to be prosecuted they would need to be caught with the evidence, but from what we have seen and heard this is a job for armed police – so as I said earlier we are on our own. There is no way any of us are going to stand between a poacher and a sooty tern egg.