Last visit to Te Rae o Atiu delivered a surprise of a chick in burrow 17 that I had written off as an abandoned egg as the last 4 visits I hadn’t seen a bird on the egg.
That brings our total for the season to 37 chicks. The heaviest is now 600g while the youngest is just 96g.
When I took over monitoring duties from Lindsay in 2017 he told me to expect the first chick about Christmas, this year we had more than half our chicks by Christmas. I strongly suspect that global warming is responsible for the earlier timings of the birds behaviour.
Activity has stepped up in the last few days with 63 burrows being visited, as newly returned birds start prospecting for burrows to use next season.
Ted