Marauding cat wipes out colony of Threatened Australian seabirds

One free-roaming cat appears to have destroyed an entire sanctuary for threatened seabirds in the southwestern part of Australia, according to a recent study

by GrrlScientist for Forbes | @GrrlScientist

“Twinnies.”
An adult Australian fairy tern (Sternula nereis nereis), broods her two chicks on the beach at Mandurah Estuary in Western Australia.
(Credit: Claire Greenwell / Murdoch University)

The Australian fairy tern, Sternula nereis nereis, is a threatened coastal seabird that breeds in colonies on wide-open beaches. Their nests are simple, consisting of a scrape in the sand where they lay one or two eggs.

During the 2016–2017 breeding season, a group of fairy terns nested on a cleared development site near the City of Mandurah in the state of Western Australia, which required all construction be postponed. That site was subsequently developed, but to overcome a lack of suitable nesting habitat in the area, the local community and the Mandurah city government teamed up with several organizations and acquired grant funding to create the Mandurah Fairy Tern Sanctuary on the local estuary and successfully convinced the terns to establish their breeding colony on this site for the 2017–2018 breeding season (Figure 1). But would the terns return to raise their families there in the following year?