Reckless drone use leaves thousands elegant tern eggs abandoned
About 1500 elegant tern eggs were abandoned by their parents after a drone crashed into their nesting site, an island in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach, California.
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Every April, thousands of elegant terns migrating from Central and South America nest in the sands of the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, one of the last remaining protected coastal wetlands in Southern California. But in the last two weeks, the 1,300-acre coastal estuary has become a mass graveyard for unborn elegant terns. And the reckless pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles are to blame. On May 13, an unmanned aerial vehicle landed at their nesting site, intimidating about 2,500 female fishermen. About 1,500 eggs remain, none of which were viable after they were abandoned.
Nicholas Molsberry, an officer with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said no one had come to claim the drone in the three weeks since it crashed into the colony. Officer Molsberry said he was seeking a search warrant to allow him to review the contents of the drone’s memory card, which he hopes will allow him to identify the operator and the flight path the drone took that day. If he can find the person, he said, he will seek misdemeanor criminal charges relating to the needless destruction of eggs or nests, the harassment of wildlife and the use of a drone in a closed ecological reserve.
source: The New York Times
Source: The New York Times
Elegant Tern
Elegant tern (Thalasseus elegans) is a bird of the gull family. Long-billed tern of the Pacific coast, from the U.S. to Chile. Pale gray above with shaggy black cap in breeding plumage; nonbreeding birds develop white forehead. Best field mark is the slender orange bill with a slight droop. Strictly coastal; commonly found on beaches and estuaries. Similar to Royal Tern but smaller and slimmer with a thinner bill. Harsh grating calls similar to other terns.
