'How did I feel? I felt like killing the bastard!”

David Watson of Welcome Bay is angry and sad at the same time, after the white-faced tern chick he'd been nurturing on the Turret Road Bridge was senselessly killed in a rock-throwing attack.

Out of goodness, out of concern, David had built a breeding box – four compartments – and attached it to the old concrete bridge pylon. He'd regularly been watching the terns on the bridge and thought they needed a hand, a human one.

'The terns were nesting in the holes on the old wooden beams straddling the pylons. But the wind would get up from the west and blow the poor little buggers away.”

So David installed his breeding box. 'Come nesting time one of the terns took up my offer of accommodation. I thought she would line the nest with feathers and leaves and grass. But no! She laid her egg on the wooden floor and eventually a chick hatched.” Terns are minimalists.

Then David and his wife Dawn went on a cruise during Christmas. 'When we returned, the chick's still there, mum's still feeding it and everything's beaut[iful].” But when David went down to the colony on the bridge a few days ago there were only two or three chicks left – everyone had up and left.

Then what he saw just about broke the man.

'My poor little fella,” says David. 'His mother had gone and he was jammed up against the corner of his box with a rock up against him. Poor little bugger is dead, killed, a completely unnecessary act of violence. How do you think I felt?

'Some bastard had leaned over the bridge or through the railings and hit him with a stone. Poor little bugger.”

And when he came to The Weekend Sun to share his experience, someone asked David if he was alright. 'I said: ‘No, I am not alright. And give me strength to stop me killing someone'.”

Then he found his inner strength again and vowed not to give up. 'I will go back before next breeding season with a new breeding box for the terns. It will have a Perspex roof so you can still see the birds but they will be protected…protected from idiots.”

The bridge provides a rare close connection with the nesting terns. Photographers come from all over the country to get those up-close shots of the colony. 'And all those mums and their kids, who walked across the bridge, also appreciated that close encounter with the terns.”

They will again because of David Watson.