It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California. A drone crash in June forced an estimated 3,000 of the sleek seabirds with their pointed orange bills to abandon their eggs on Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County. Experts say it's possible that many of the birds set up camp on two commercial barges in nearby Long Beach Harbor. Now droves of the baby birds are falling into the ocean and drowning. "They basically landed on the barge a day or so, and it may have been two or three days, after the incident involving the drones when they left Bolsa Chica," said Tim Daly, spokesman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Eggs littered the sand, but there was no sign of life around or in them. The seabirds that should have been keeping watch had taken off, terrified by a drone that crash-landed into their nesting grounds on an island at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. "We've never seen such devastation here," said Melissa Loebl, an environmental scientist who manages the Huntington Beach reserve. "This has been really hard for me as a manager." Some 3,000 elegant terns fled the reserve after the drone crashed May 12, leaving behind 1,500 to 2,000 eggs, none of them viable.