Alice Desai and Lana Iremadze are volunteers who joined the Biom Association earlier this year through the European Solidarity Corps program. Over the past two months, they have participated in numerous volunteer activities alongside Biom’s experts, and last week they were on Lastovo with the bird conservation team to support them in monitoring shearwaters as part of LIFE TETIDE project.
Greetings from Lastovo!
We fell in love with Lastovo as soon as the rising sun revealed the island’s azure waters, dotted with lush islets home to various marine bird colonies. However, only at sundown did we hear the birds that brought us to this archipelago: the Yelkouan shearwaters. At night these nocturnal hunters take to the star filled skies in an eerie concert of haunting cries that echo from the bottom of rock cavities in which they nest.
Threatening though they may sound, these endearing birds spend their days dutifully guarding their nests for the first half of the year. Inconspicuously nestled deep in the narrow holes of the islands’ jagged rocks, they lay a single egg in February/March to which any disturbance or damage would render the breeding pair unsuccessful until the following year.
Despite their best efforts and dedication all throughout their long nesting season, their egg and offspring remain at the mercy of invasive species such as rats and cats introduced by humans and against which evolution has not yet prepared them. To tackle the devastating impact of nest predation, we carried out biosecurity measures and spent our days monitoring and searching for nests, hopping around uninhabited islands and squeezing into the cracks of cliff faces. Wild, beautiful and testing, the Lastovo archipelago gave us valuable experiences and unforgettable memories.
