From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

Popo’ia Island isn’t far from Oahu Island. Photo by Max:

Some people call the island ‘Flat Island’ for obvious reasons. From a distance it is hard to tell what the things are that are sticking up. But when you get closer you can see that they are people!

People kayak and swim to the island. David and I went there with Jaap Eijzenga, a biologist with Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources-Dept. of Forestry and Wildlife. He is in charge of offshore island seabird sanctuaries. He has been restoring the native vegetation on the islands, protecting the native wildlife and working to rid the islands of their many introduced plants and animals.

The island is a limestone swiss cheese where wedge-tailed shearwaters and the smaller Bulwer’s petrels make their nests. On other islands like Manana Island, the wedge-tailed shearwaters dig out their burrows in soil. Due to the introduced vegetation that doesn’t hold the soil well, the birds can get buried in their own burrows. Some massive mudslides have occured after rains which have instantly trapped them. The birds at Popo’ia island have sturdier natural shelters.
Some of the shearwaters that we saw were sitting out in the open socializing. These birds were likely non-breeders that don’t have a mate or a nest site yet.
Some birds were courting each other by allopreening (grooming each other’s feathers).

A big thank you to Jaap who took the time to show us the island and to explain the restoration and monitoring work that he and many other volunteers have been doing on these precious tiny islands. For more information on the characteristics, threats to, and restoration work being on Popo’ia Island see the website of the Offshore Islet Restoration Committee.

This week I helped two graduate students of David Hyrenbach, Pam Michael and Andrew Titmus, perform necropsies on four seabirds that had been found dead on Tern Island. Tern Island is a small island in the French Frigate shoals northwest of the main Hawaiian islands. It is a home to many species of tropical seabirds, nesting green sea turtles and Hawaiian Monk seals. I spent a summer there years ago after graduating from college and Pomona student Matthew Barbour’06 went there after spending the summer on the Farallon Islands where Eleanor is currently. It’s possible that he found the birds we worked on!

We started with two young Tristam’s storm petrels.
These birds did not have all of their adult feathers; they died before leaving their nests. These chicks had recieved all of their food from their parents. The parents appeared to have been doing an OK job feeding them; they were really fat! One of the labels for one of the chicks said that a Bulwer’s petrel had taken over the burrow of the Tristam’s storm petrel. Perhaps the chick had been kicked out by the other bird.
When we opened up the stomachs of the Tristam’s storm petrels it was shocking to see that their stomachs were full of small plastic particles and even fishing line. It is possible that this plastic contributed to their deaths.
These birds live around 500 miles from any human population. Where did they get that plastic? Unfortunately, the Pacific Ocean is filled with plastic that is churning in a clockwise gyre. According to David Hyrenbach, the main concentration is between 30 – 35 degrees N almost in the center of the gyre. Storm petrels feed by picking up prey floating on the surface of the ocean. Their feeding strategy makes them really susceptible to ingesting small pieces of floating plastic.
Next we examined the stomachs of two adult black-footed albatross.

Andrew is investigating the quantity and type of plastic ingested by albatross. In addition to performing necropsies on dead birds, he dissects apart boluses (pellets of undigestible prey parts) regurgitated by albatross breeding on Midway Island and Kure Island, both leeward Hawaiian islands. In California, marine educators in the organization Oikonos are bringing albatross boluses into classrooms so that school children can see firsthand where plastic ends up. The two albatross that we dissected were full of flying fish eggs and squid beaks. Andrew is going to go through the contents to see if there were any plastic objects in there as well.

For two related posts, see Eleanor Caves’ post on ‘Gull Juju’ from the Farallon Islands project and my previous post ‘Operation Balloon Recovery’ from the Channel Islands Project.

Well, my last boat day has officially come and gone, and with it my roommate Jordan.  It’s a really weird thought to think that the next boat that lands here will be taking me away!  However, the season is definitely starting to slow down.  Murre work is completely finished, and we’ve started officially calculating their productivity this year, a depressing task.  Across the island, productivity will be near zero, the worst ever seen in a non-el Nino year (during el Nino, murre productivity often averages around 0.2).

Western Gulls, whose chicks are growing up very fast, are also winding down.  We’ve officially stopped monitoring nests that failed (whose chicks or eggs disappeared), and are now only working to re-sight chicks we banded this year, confirming via their unique metal band number that they are still alive, and recording the chicks’ feathering status.

Cassin’s Auklets, this year’s greatest success story, are also, at least for me, nearing an end.  I am down to only two chicks left on my daily chick checks, the rest have fledged.  Many of the nest boxes DO contain birds who are currently sitting on their second egg, but they are on what we call a “skip period,” where we don’t disturb them for a couple of weeks.  By the time the eggs hatch, or come off of skip, I will probably have left the island.

Rhinocerous Auklets and Pigeon Guillemot work, however, is still going strong.  Pigeon Guillemot diet watch continues to happen every three days, and because of recent foggy weather, we haven’t been able to do diet watch at one of our sites in almost 10 days.  To compensate for this, we are now going on “standby,” meaning that any day that isn’t foggy will automatically become a PIGU diet watch day, so that we can catch up on lost data from the site on Lighthouse Hill.

Rhino diet is still being monitored as well–we just finished up our third round of Rhino netting, and aside from an extremely hard bite on my finger, everything went really smoothly.  Although the Rhino in this picture may look incredibly tangled, seabirds this large are, for the most part, really easy to remove from the net.  The largest complication with rhinos stems from the fact that they have a very long tongue, and twice now, I’ve seen the net actually wrap around their tongues.  Removing birds who have been caught in this way can be VERY difficult, since you can actually rip their tongue out if their are removed incorrectly, and you still have to be wary around their really strong bills.

The diet of the Rhinos has also changed noticably as of late.  Whereas our first round of netting produced an abundance of Greenling, the last two rounds have seen diets of around 90% Pacific Saury.  As you can see in the picture, Saury vary greatly in size, weighing anywhere from just a few grams up to almost thirty.  We’ve also seen a lot of squid, and a few Myctophids, the deep sea fish, which are most often California Headlightfish or Blue Lanternfish.

My Pigeon Guillemot Breed study continues to take up at least a few hours every five days, and these chicks are really growing!  As I mentioned, they are often born in clutches of two, and unfortunately, very few Chick #2’s remain, most having been killed by their sibling or simply starved.  The chicks that are left, however, are growing very quickly, and we’ve even already seen our first fledge.  Believe it or not, the chick in this photo is the same chick that I pictured earlier in the season, although then he looked only like a tiny black puffball.  These chicks now weigh almost 400 grams, and so we’ve started banding them and checking their attendance daily, to monitor fledge dates.

Here is actually a picture of one of my only sites that still has two chicks in it.  As they get bigger and bigger, they look more and more uncomfortable wedged into their tiny crevices.  Every five days, I have to pull them out and weigh them, and it’s actually getting pretty difficult, since it’s hard to wrap my hand around them, and often hard to remove them from their wedged positions.

Finally, with the slowing down of the bird work, we’ve all had a chance to get some other types of work done.  A lot of maintenance goes in to keeping all of these buildings running, as well as maintaining all of the study boxes and plots, so over the last few days, I’ve been working on Cassin’s Auklet Box Shades.  These shades keep our Auklet boxes close to the temperature of a natural burrow, but only a few wooden ones are currently in use.  The rest of them are built out of foam, which is really starting to disitengrate, making it difficult to identify which box you’re working at, but also spreading bits of foam all over the island.  To remedy this, we’re working on constructing enough wooden shades to replace all the foam ones.  Last week, Jordan and Meghan cut the wood for 64 new shades, and over the last few days, Hannah and I have nailed them all together and painted them white.  It’s taken up quite a bit of time actually, and hopefully in the next couple of days we’ll get them distributed across the island.

To end with, I thought I’d include a picture of yesterday’s brunch, which was the best one yet, thanks to the abundance of fresh fruit.  On the menu were watermelon, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, nectarines, mango, chocolate chip banana bread, french toast, scrambled eggs, and (for everyone else) bacon.  It’s always nice to have such fresh fruit available, since it doesn’t last for long!

Well, that’s all for now!

Best,

Eleanor

Charlotte and I have once again taken up our posts in the BLM office because we had no field work planned for today. This is the slightly less glamorous part of our work here, but more comfortable on hot days (yesterday was a scorcher, and I think the AC in our trailer might have broken…) and still satisfying, especially when we complete things. I am the sort of person who loves checking things off my to-do list. Today, for example, we have already had several small victories: we entered all the data from our banding on friday into excel (check), got it uploaded into bandit, a national banding database (check), updated our bird species list (check), and I finished the MAPS station map I’ve been working on for the past week or two (CHECK!). As I put the finishing touches on this map, I was comparing it to sabrinas from two years ago and noticed that she finished her map on exactly the same day two years ago. Eerie.

Earlier today, while I was sitting on the porch of the shady rest office, I noticed a little bird rolling around on the other end of the porch, looking very helpless and lost indeed. I walked over to check it out, and next to the bird was a splatter of yolk and albumin and some broken shell.

I consulted with charlotte, and we thought maybe it was a baby cowbird, because of the broken egg with it on the ground. cowbirds are nest parasites; the parents lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and the eggs hatch earlier that the resident’s eggs. when the cowbird egg hatches, the chick pushes the rest of the eggs in the nest out to get rid of the competition, and the nest parents raise and feed the cowbird.  perhaps this little chick fell out of the nest while it was pushing the egg out? i had a strong suspicion that the nest it was in was a house sparrow nest, because there is a pair of house sparrows that hangs out in the area where we found the chick. house sparrows are an invasive species that comes from europe, and in rural/agricultural areas they outcompete native birds for cavities to nest in. we looked around a little and found the nest. we then had to decide: should we put it back? i thought we should put it back regardless of what species it was, but charlotte thought that if it was a house sparrow chick we should just leave it in some grass to get eaten by a cat, because house sparrows are invasive. in any case, she thought it was a cowbird, so we put it back. this chick will presumably keep pushing the sparrow eggs out, so i guess in the end we chose parasite over invasive.

I later googled image searched house sparrow and cowbird chicks, and I think it was probably a house sparrow chick because it had big yellow gape protuberances. oh well.

Last Friday morning (4:00 AM to be exact), Amy and I very sleepily headed out to our Canyon Creek banding station, with John taking the reins driving the pickup. All in all, we’ve had a very productive season, and that Friday was no exception; we banded a total of 18 birds, 14 of which we caught in our nets. We caught a few new species–a Song sparrow (present year-round at the BFS in Claremont), American goldfinches, and a Chipping sparrow. In fact, we haven’t even observed the Song or Chipping sparrows at our site until that day. The American goldfinches were a fun catch–four goldfinches had simultaneously flown into net 8 and formed a tight little square of bright yellow blobs in the two lower trammels.

We’re approaching the end of the breeding season, so we expect to see more and more hatch years (chicks born this calendar year) as the summer progresses. We’ve also had quite a few recaptures, which form the basis of survivorship estimates. The same brown thrasher continually gets caught at net 10, and we’ve had quite a few House wren recaptures.

Finally, four of the birds that we banded were the Western meadowlark nestlings that Amy and I have been monitoring through the season. These nestlings, like most bird chicks, are hideous; they are all awkward protruding joints, pin feathers, and bare skin. However, they do inspire quite the protective urge (as you’ll see in Amy’s post about our rescue of a potential House Sparrow/Brown-headed cowbird chick [I hope it's a cowbird]) because they are so completely helpless, and try to use their nubs of wings to cover their heads. They are simultaneously ugly, pathetic, and adorable–in short, a face that only a mother (or a birder) could love.

It’ll be intriguing to study these little chicks’ survivorships. According to John Carlson, the first year is typically the hardest year overall for birds to survive. He cites the example of Emperor penguins in Antarctica–if nestlings manage to make it past the first year, then they can live to be 10+ years old, but the great challenge is getting through that first year. Hopefully they’ll make it, and with any luck, John and other students can recapture them in the future.

Aloha from Oahu!
I am here with my colleague David Hyrenbach from Hawaii Pacific University. We are in the formative stages of beginning a project with wedge-tailed shearwaters. Yesterday we went with Wendy Johnson from the Hawaii Audubon Society to the Freeman Seabird Reserve at Black Point.

Mr Freeman donated this land to preserve the area for the nesting wedge-tailed shearwaters. Historically these seabirds nested all along the Oahu coastline. Now this is one of the only places left where they nest on Oahu; most of the other known sites are small islets offshore.

We searched the boulder field for nesting birds. They like to either dig burrows or nest under boulders. We found some out in the open.

Most of the wedge-tailed shearwaters nest here but a few lucky residents in the neighborhood adjacent to the reserve have a few birds nesting in their yards! Unfortunately, living close to people means the birds are vulnerable to dogs, cats, and mowing. We found this bird that looked like it had been attacked by a cat.

We found some of the birds had eggs. They only lay one egg per year. Let’s hope for a successful nesting season!

The Hawaii Audubon Society has been working hard to restore the native vegetation to the site. If you are interested in volunteering or in making a donation to help the ‘Ua’u kani; contact them!

So, as if getting to go down to Mussel Flat yesterday chasing after Oystercatchers wasn’t enough of a treat, today we all took a field trip down to Jewel Cave, on the East end of the island, during low tide, to go tidepooling.  All I can say is, the intertidal zone out here is absolutely another world, and the caves and coves down there were places I literally could have spent all day.  There was so much to see that I’m going to make this post primarily pictures, rather than words, and hopefully convey a sense of what a dramatically different, colorful world those tidepools are.

Well, there’s a brief overview of what I saw!  Pretty neat.  The field trip took up most of the morning, and the afternoon was taken up with my chick checks and elephant seal resights.  Tonight we start our next round of rhino netting, so we’ll have nightwork again for the next four nights.  That’s all for now!

Best,

Eleanor

Since Amy’s arrival, I have been eating much better. I’m not the world’s best cook–far from it–but Amy is both creative and skilled at making some delicious meals. We’ve had curry (tasty), baked ziti (great), cheese pasta (fantastic), and home-made granola (amazing). Finally our stove and oven are getting some good use!

You may be asking, who’s Paula Deen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJZeG0aRlvQ

Charlotte and I have  been working hard and getting out to our study site almost every day. We went out banding two days ago, and caught lots of birds, including yellow warblers, robins, and brown thrashers. We also recaptured a male house wren that sabrina banded two years ago (exciting!).  Here are some of the pictures we got from saturday: