Thursday, June 27, 2013

Country Island Update V

HEY!!!

So, here is another update!

Jess wants a proper introduction.  She is super awesome and I will explain her studies further in a later blog.

We now know about 16 active Roseate Tern Nests, and banded our first Roseate chick and adult!  Our Arctic and Common chicks are beginning to hatch in full force, which is keeping us quite busy with our banding and measurements! We’re following 60 Arctic and 60 Common Tern nests, and all 16 Roseate Tern nests!  Out of the 120 Arctic/Common Tern nests, we’re following them all for hatch success, a subset of that for productivity (if they make it to 15 and 20 days old), a subset of that for feeding watches, and we’re doing growth measurements for half of our nests.

We are following a nest with a clutch of four, which is interesting, because terns don’t often have four eggs! The eggs are just starting to hatch, hopefully all four of them do! 

We’re not quite done our species ratio, but so far it seems like we have more arctic terns than commons here this year! 

On the birding front, we found a juvenile Black Tern and our Short-billed Dowitchers are starting to show up! That puts us at about 110 or 111 birds on the year! 

Exciting times at Country Island!

Brennan

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