Every April, we welcome common terns to Brockholes, where they arrive after their long flight from Africa - a 22,000-mile round-trip! 

Terns enjoy nesting on shores, on gravel or shale, but thanks to our vast lakes, and a helping hand from our conservation teamthey really breed here at Brockholes too.

We create five-star accomodation for them in the form of our tern rafts, which you may have seen floating in Number 1 Pit Lake. The rafts are lined with gravel which mimics the rocky shorelines the terns love, while the lake itself is full of tasty fish for them to feed to their young. 

One of our tern rafts has a live camera attached, so you can watch the birds nesting and raising a family from the comfort of your home, and we build lots of other rafts to put out in time for the breeding season each year.

View our tern camera here

As Tom mentions in the video above, we have few resources to build these rafts so they are sturdy and bouyant enough to handle the terns and their eggs.

A small donation for our terns can make a huge difference to our migratory friends. It costs on average £250 to create a tern raft from scratch, and with your help we can build and release more rafts to help increase the breeding population of this wonderful bird.