On 21th and 22th of February we removed three old rafts for breeding of Common Tern from the second water basin at Ormož Basins Nature Reserve to prepare the area for the renaturation works under action C.2. Old rafts were decrepit and were out of use for the last couple of years. They will be replaced with the gravel island, build under this project – on 19th of February we held public opening of tenders for renaturation work, which are now being reviewed. Action was phisicaly exhausting and obstruced by weather (rain, cold water in bains), but we managed to disassemble rafts and store the scraps anyway. Work was done with the help of machinery – tractor and skidding winch and hardworking volunteers from Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Maribor.
Some rafts technical information and history
Preparation and placement of rafts was done between 30th of March and 7th of April 2001, 19 volunteers participated. We used 6.2 m2 of Oak wood (around 6 tons), 60 aluminum strips, 39.9 m3 of Styrofoam (12 blocks of 125x380x70 cm), several cubic meters of gravel and two tons of iron railroad tracks to anchor the raft. One raft without the gravel had a weight of 2.4 tonnes. Terns were nesting on the rafts between the years 2001 and 2009 and the Black-headed Gulls were nesting between 2003 and 2008. Altogether in all these years the rafts served as the nesting ground for 455 pairs of Common Terns and 188 pairs of Black-headed Gulls, averaging 50 pairs of Common Terns and 30 pairs of Black-headed Gulls per year.
 Photo: Tilen Basle |
 Photo: Tilen Basle |
 Photo: Tilen Basle |
 Photo: Tilen Basle |
