Seychelles in March

What started out (for Jerry and Ron) as a holiday, visiting Willow, and helping her to catch Black Parrot, turned into something much more complicated. When her organization - Seychelles Islands Foundation (SIF) heard of our trip, they thought it would be an excellent opportunity to train their staff (and some volunteers), in bird ringing. After a few weeks of email discussions, we agreed to run two, week long ringing courses (there seemed to be too many people to run a single course). There isn't a ringing scheme operating in the Seychelles, so we would be using numbered, colour rings. One concern was the potential lack of birds to keep everyone busy (the Seychelles have only a limited variety of landbirds), but Willow had the foresight to start baiting a site, and encouraged good numbers of birds to rice scattered on the ground.
SIF put us up in one of their newly built bungalows, on Praslin (second largest island), near their Vallee De Mai reserve & headquarters, where the famous Coco de mer trees grow. A guy called Chris Tagg was researching the endemic "Bronze Gheckos" and we had a couple of nights helping him catch them.



On the first ringing course, there were five trainees, and everyone got a chance to handle, and do a variety of biometric measurements, on about 20 birds. The main species were Madagascar Fody, with lesser numbers of Madagascar Turtle Dove. We also caught an additional six species (mainly endemics). The second week saw six trainees, and a remarkably similar range/number of birds.
Final totals (processed) for each species for week1/week2 were
Madagascar Fody 59/53
Seychelles Bulbul 11/4
Indian Mynah 1/2
Barred Ground Dove 2/4
Madagascar Turtle Dove 13/28
Seychelles Sunbird 4/1
Seychelles Blue Pigeon 1/0
Seychelles Black Parrot 0/1


Barred Ground Dove


Madagascar Fody


Seychelles Blue Pigeon


Black parrot

On the weekend between the two courses, Willow, Chris, Ron and Jerry stayed on Cousin Island, a short boat trip from Praslin, with large number of seabirds breeding. The most common species seen were Fairy Tern and White-tailed Tropicbird (both species breeding from egg stage, up to large young), Lesser Noddy and Bridled Tern were about to start breeding, and three endemics - Seychelles Magpie Robin, Warbler and Fody had mainly completed breeding. Tropical and Wedge-tailed Shearwaters were just starting to come ashore. Together with Giant Tortoise, Tiger Rays and Lesser Frigatebirds to add interest, it was the highlight of our visit, and much too brief a stay.


White-tailed tropicbird


Lesser nody


Fairy tern (adult and chick)