Tenacity of Terns

Arctic terns are said to return to Orkney ‘in the first mist of May’. What happens next is unpredictable – as Stephen Rutt discovered when he worked as a volunteer with the bird observatory on North Ronaldsay.

Averages are unhelpful with terns. They are boom and bust – sometimes in the same season. It took them a week from when they arrived to settle down into their colonies. It took until July for summer to arrive. In the intervening two months of rain the nests in the bog by the loch were washed out, eggs got cold, the vegetation didn’t grow and didn’t hide their eggs from the skuas. I watched what