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Bird Island Photos 2
The beach and wildlife. See Bird Island Photos 1 for the buildings on the island.
You could walk around the island in an hour or so. Just too idyllic for words.
Walking around the island, with the Indian Ocean waves breaking on the pristine white coral-sand beach, and the strident sound of hundreds of thousands of Sooty Terns. This beach would have looked just the same a thousand years ago.
John on the beach - in the days when he had ribs.
Esmeralda and friend. Esmeralda is said to be the largest land tortoise in the world, and is over 150 years old. She is actually a he.
Esmeralda spent all day lumbering around the rooms, graciously accepting handfuls of grass, and having sun-tan oil rubbed into her shell, giving it a nice deep gloss.
Beautiful Fairy Terns.
Common Noddies.
Non-breeding adult Greater Crested Tern.
A Sooty tern on a huge pile of dried seaweed at the northern end of the island. It was dragging its wings along the ground, pretending to be injured, in order to lure us away from its nest.
The Sooty tern colony which occupied the northern half of the island, spilled over onto the upper part of the beach.
At the peak of the breeding season there are a million Sooty terns on the island. The air is full of birds, and
the din in the colony is indescribable.
We didn't venture into the heart of the colony - the air was full of birds screaming in the strident and harsh way that terns have.
