Well, we’re keeping busy!! This post will be a few quick notes that I can think of…
Since my last update, we had 4 ½ days straight of rain which kept us out of the colony, and it gave us a bit of a set-back. It made the following days quite busy, but we’re all caught up now!! When the colony is wet, we can’t do our work, so we got behind in our banding and measuring. This was pretty bad timing since most of our chicks hatched within those four days!
But we’re now getting in a good routine of pred watch and GIS, chick feeding watches, and our monitoring. Most of our roseate nests now have chicks, and many are starting to leave their nests which making tracking them very difficult. So a lot of time spent will be on roseate re-sights as well.
Oh, and in 4 days, we'll be doing our 2nd Tern census to count all of our late nesters!
On a side note, an interesting part of the project this year is Jess’ Masters project. She placed radio transmitters on 29 birds to track their movements. Its really cool, because she has picked up signals from other birds with radio transmitters, which is likely either Ipswich sparrows or Gulls from Sable island, or tagged Blackpolls! It will be interesting to hear more about that!
We had our last visitors leave the island on Thursday, so now it’s the four of us for the next few weeks, and soon we’ll be all out of fresh food…. Good thing we’ve got lots of canned foods!!
On the new birds front, we got a Common Nighthawk, a Blue Winged teal, Whimbrels, a Thick billed Murre, and a few Atlantic Puffins! 116 birds on the year! Still gunning for 120+!
Brennan
Since my last update, we had 4 ½ days straight of rain which kept us out of the colony, and it gave us a bit of a set-back. It made the following days quite busy, but we’re all caught up now!! When the colony is wet, we can’t do our work, so we got behind in our banding and measuring. This was pretty bad timing since most of our chicks hatched within those four days!
But we’re now getting in a good routine of pred watch and GIS, chick feeding watches, and our monitoring. Most of our roseate nests now have chicks, and many are starting to leave their nests which making tracking them very difficult. So a lot of time spent will be on roseate re-sights as well.
Oh, and in 4 days, we'll be doing our 2nd Tern census to count all of our late nesters!
On a side note, an interesting part of the project this year is Jess’ Masters project. She placed radio transmitters on 29 birds to track their movements. Its really cool, because she has picked up signals from other birds with radio transmitters, which is likely either Ipswich sparrows or Gulls from Sable island, or tagged Blackpolls! It will be interesting to hear more about that!
We had our last visitors leave the island on Thursday, so now it’s the four of us for the next few weeks, and soon we’ll be all out of fresh food…. Good thing we’ve got lots of canned foods!!
On the new birds front, we got a Common Nighthawk, a Blue Winged teal, Whimbrels, a Thick billed Murre, and a few Atlantic Puffins! 116 birds on the year! Still gunning for 120+!
Brennan
Hope you are getting lots of pictures to share with us when you get home....counting the days!! Hope you have better weather! Glad I finally had a chance to talk to you the other night! miss you! Mom
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