Country Island Update Part II

Well, the time really does flies fast out here…

We’ve been getting into a bit of a routine of doing several errands around the island and camp, and doing General Island Surveys (GIS), with some adventures along the way.  We do our GISs twice a day at 6:00 am, 12 Noon, or 6:00 pm.  What we do is go to six different points across the island and record all of the predatory birds, seabirds, shorebirds and other water birds that we see.  We do this to get an understanding of what is around the island.  We’ve seen some neat birds during our watches including Harlequin Ducks, Cory’s Shearwater, Purple Sandpipers and Iceland Gulls. 

One of our tasks new to the island this year is the Japanese Knotweed Project.  It is an invasive plant that is incredibly difficult to control.  They are found on three parts of the island, so we’re trying to weed them out by placing Astroturf over it to try and choke it out.

The weather has been pretty cold and foggy… It has not been higher than 11 Degrees since we’ve arrived, and quite often we can’t see further than a couple hundred meters!!  Despite the cold weather, we finally got the rain we needed. I even decided to have a shower in it, when it was SIX DEGREES out! It really wasn’t all that bad though.  The rain is good because it filled all our buckets for dish water and more showers.  The much needed rain came with a bit of an adventure though!  Last weekend we got woken up to galling winds during a rainstorm.  Our kitchen door was slamming open and closed, and its sides and a side of our living tent went undone.   So the three of us braved the storm to secure our tents so that everything can keep dry (And we still got up for our morning GIS!). 

We’re still eating pretty well… We’re out of bread so Charmaine baked some today (Which is better than store bought stuff anyways!!), and it will last us a little while!

What else…

Our bird species list is now at 60 species! Our goal is to get over 100 which hasn’t been done before…. Our recent additions include:
Common Terns
Arctic Terns
A Cory’s Shearwater (I didn’t see it L)
A Northern Waterthrush (First recorded at CI)
A Swainsons Thrush (First recorded at CI)
A Philidelphia Vireo
A Iceland Gulls (First recorded at CI)
A Blackpoll Warbler
A Black and White Warbler
A Grey Catbird
A Flycatcher (likely Alder, but he wasn’t singing for us!)
and more! 

The terns are staying around the island longer and longer in larger numbers, but they’re still not sticking around the whole day.  They leave in the afternoon to forage and stuff.  When the terns start to stay on the island all day and night, we will start our Predator Watches.  Predator watches involve sitting in a blind for two hours and recording and observing all predator intrusions around the Tern colony.

But until then, we’ll continue doing what we’ve been doing the past few days… our GISs and errands around the Island…

Brennan