I thought I’d take a picture of the house! Here is where the biologists and interns live! The first floor has a living room, data room, phone room, kitchen, and bathroom. Upstairs has several bedrooms and a bathroom. Jessie and I share the “walk-through” room, Pete has the “wind” room, Russ and Annie have the “sun” room, and when Katrina and Michelle come back, they’ll have the “jane fonda” room.
This is the back of the house. The stairs lead up to the walk-through room. Jessie sleeps closer to the window.
Ok, so this morning Pete took me to the murre blind where I did X-plot. Basically, we climbed up this rock face and went to the little structure at the top that is essentially a box with three windows and a back door. It’s called a murre blind because it oversees the common murre (COMU) colony without disturbing them too much because we observe them through the windows.
This is X-plot. The plot only focuses on Common Murres. So my job this morning was to identify each breeding site in this area that is numbered on a diagram in my notebook (usually the same sites are used every year because the rocks form natural little crannies), and determine 1) if there was a bird there and 2) if there is a bird, whether or not there was an egg under the bird. I’ll be doing this every morning from about 8:30-11:30
The picture makes it look like a random jumble of black-and-white birds, but after watching them for 3 hours, it becomes pretty obvious each nest site is a territory that is clearly marked from the next. Many of the birds present are with their mate, and they like to preen each other’s feathers, which looked much more careful and affectionate than poking another bird in the head with your beak may seem. This picture was taken when I was on a rock slightly to the right of the blind, as you can see the window-side of the blind on the edge of the picture.
Also, I don’t think you can see any eggs in this picture, but their eggs are really pretty! They’re usually light-to-bright green or blue with black speckles, and are fairly large. It reminded me of very large Easter Eggs.
Then, after lunch, Pete took me to do Pigeon Guillemot (PIGU) breeding checks. This check happens once every 5 days. First we checked boxes (I’ll explain the boxes a different day) and crevices around Garbage Gulch (I didn’t get a picture of this) and then Lighthouse Hill, pictured right. We checked boxes and mostly crevices along the rock face to the left. It was mostly rock scrambling, but I’m thankful I’m a confident rock climber, as getting to some of the crevices took some tricky footwork and maneuvering! Also, the rock is pretty soft and crumbly so you got to be careful when doing this check because there are lots of gull nests around too and a dislodge rock could hurt somebody underneath or crush a gull nest.
In the Pigeon Guillemot breeding checks, we look at each labeled nest site and check to see if there are 1 or 2 eggs, and if there previously were eggs, then if there are any chicks. If there are new chicks, we band them. I got to band 3 chicks today! Here I am holding the third chick of the day at site 104A. It was still a little damp from its egg, which means it probably hatched early today or yesterday. ADORABLE!
Also, a kind of relevant side note: a lot of the species here are referred to by the 4 letter short name, which is usually made up of the first two letters of their full name, like COMU for Common Murre, and PIGU for Pigeon Guillemot. I’ll try to use their full names for the blog but I might slip in the future and use their shortened name. What’s kind of funny is “pigu” in Chinese means “butt” so I was a little confused at first when Pete and Annie were talking about “checking on the pigus” this afternoon, but got that figured out pretty quickly.
Pete and I finished around 3 and I’m done for the day! Since I have a bunch of time I’m going to go read up on some of the protocols for the other studies I’ll be doing soon.
Hope you enjoyed the post!
Love, Kristina