![]() ![]() A GT that size has a mouth big enough to eat an NFL-size football. Maybe because of the birds, Farquhar has the largest average size GTs in the Seychelles -many of them over a meter long. "You just look across the flats and it's like cannonballs dropping into the water from every direction," says Becker, a five-year veteran at Farquhar who in 2015 guided a BBC film crew gathering material for a sequel to the documentary The Blue Planet. The GTs can watch the low-flying birds from under the water, track them, match their speed, and then with a final thrust from their powerful tail, catapult into the air and either knock the bird down and disable it, or bite and carry the squawking mass into the water where it's gone in one easy bite. Longtime guides Peter King, Brendan Becker, Nic Isabelle, and Matthieu Cosson who work for the South Africa-based outfitter Fl圜astaway have watched many days where the flats on the lagoon side of the island erupt with the assaults of giant trevally feasting on fledgling terns. ![]() Every year the birds congregate at Goulette for nesting, and every year the giant trevally (also GTs, pronounced "geets") of the Farquhar group gather to eat as many terns as possible. While those events are anecdotally fascinating because they so rarely happen, the feeding frenzy at Goulette is a far more predictable and widespread type of carnage. Or of a pike that opportunistically snacks on a duckling. And when their trial flights begin, that's when all hell breaks loose.Īll fly fishers have heard tales of a giant brown trout gulping a baby swallow when it falls from a riverside mud nest. When they first fly in October, the fledglings more than double the number of birds in the air and over the water. There is an urgent need for the fledglings to fly as soon as possible, to get off the island where their supply of food and fresh water is rapidly disappearing, and the tick population is booming. While nesting, one tern hunts for food while the other tends to the eggs, and with all those birds on one little island, the adults have to work harder and longer to find less food than they normally would in the open ocean. That number also includes cackling crowds of other terns like the brown noddy, lesser noddy, fairy tern, and other seabirds that stake out their turfs on the island the same way that Chinatown and Little Italy sit side by side in major cities. In August and September every year at Goulette Island there are more than 500,000 breeding pairs of terns covering the roughly eight city blocks of exposed coral. ![]() The sooty tern ( Onychoprion fuscatus nubilosus) is the most common seabird in that part of the world, but humans rarely see or come in contact with them because they live and fly in open expanses of water, and only nest in isolated places where predators can't get at the eggs. Goulette is the creole word for "tern," and it's also a desolate isle in the Indian Ocean. ![]()
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