Thursday, September 1, 2016

August, 6. The Motykley Bay Trip

The Motykley Bay Trip, August 6.

Early in the morning we set off to the Balagannoe village, a small fishing place at the estuary of the Tauy river. The village is populated by the almost exclusively by the caviar/fish poachers, as there is no other occupation in this place. We have a network of friends in the village and in the same tide cycle we managed to set our boat and escaped the massive mudflats in the view of the village at the coming tide. We were speeding up against the tidal waves in order to get to another shallow part of the Bay, namely the "Rotten Corner" of the Motykley bay, which can be surveyed only at the high tide. We did skip some of the nests on the Onatsevicha peninsula in order to get to the bay with the tide. And we managed just to do so. Just before the high tide started to disappear in the "Rotten Corner" we were coming out from the shallows. The surveys went along the populated (yes, two fishing camps were in place of the historic (est. 1690s) Motykley villages) coast at slow speed, thanks to the low tide, but at the time we came to the Tokareva bay we were greeted by the coming tidal wave. The Tokareva bay nest, after many years of dormancy, brought a nice chick.

On the photo above one can see an adult and a chick atop of a fine seastack of the Tokareva bay.

We went to the Stanukevicha peninsula coast in a view of the Talan island and were hit by the darkness. This determined our night destination: the Talan Island. We set course there for a night.

In total we surveyed 11 productive nests, three of which had 2 chicks. Not a bad result.

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