So obviously Im a dirty rotten liar since my last post I promised to have pictures for the following day, and then completely failed to even write a post, let alone post pictures. I hope to redeem myself today with a picture of the cutest chick ever.
To sum up the activities of the last 2 days –
Yesterday in the morning was REALLY foggy but I did X-plot again. The rocks were a little slippery but I did not slip and fall and crack my head open as I’m sure my mom is fearing. Then, I wasn’t scheduled for anything in the afternoon so I did some data entry (documentation of dead birds) in the computer system. Also, yesterday was my turn to cook dinner! I decided to pull a twist and make breakfast for dinner. I made banana pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, banana bread muffins, fried some bacon, and cut up a ton of orange slices. It took a little longer than I expected but I think it was ok since Russ and Pete wanted to watch the Stanley Cup finals which ran until 8 ish anyway so dinner was served right as the game ended.
This morning, before I went to the murre blind to do X-plot, I did re-sighting of Pigeon Guillemots (PIGU). This involved basically going up Lighthouse Hill and finding PIGU’s with my binoculars and checking for banding patterns. There is a 4 digit system of reading the banding pattern of the PIGU’s: You record in order the code for each color of each band on the PIGU’s legs: top left, bottom left, top right, bottom right. If it doesn’t have 4 bands, you record the lack of a band as 0 (zero), but only if it has at least 1 band. So if a bird only had 2 metal bands, it’d be M0M0, but if it had Grey – Yellow – Blue – Metal, it’d be GYBM. Also, I would record what breeding site it was near. The point kindof is to figure out which breeding sites are being used and additionally who is using it.
Then I went to the Murre Blind. Today was pretty windy. I think during the daytime it topped out around 30-35 knots, but a couple hours ago (around 7) it was 40-45. (1 knot is about equal to 1.15 mph) Right now, the whole house is kind of quivering and shaking because of the wind! So this morning at the Murre Blind it got really but again, I did not fall off the cliff. I took a couple pictures of Pete taking the census of the Common Murres (COMU’s) with his clicker.
I was basically waiting for him to finish so I could use the rock to get a better view of X-plot. I don’t know how he was able to kneel on the rock – if I did that today I would have been blown off, especially since my rainjacket is really big and catches a lot of wind. I guess Pete weighs a little more than I do.
After lunch, we all checked on the Cassin’s Auklets (CAAU) and Rhinocerous Auklets (RHAU) for a couple different studies. Their burrows and boxes are all over, so we started on North Landing in the Habitat Structure.
This is the Habitat Structure – it was made by an artist in the last few decades – it makes a great home for small birds that like to make their nests in burrows, like the Cassins, and makes it easy for us to check on them.
The inside of the Habitat Structure is hollow, and we enter by crawling in through the little door Annie is proudly displaying to the left.
From the inside, we can see inside the burrows without disturbing the chicks too much because there is a clear plastic window into each burrow that can be removed if we need to weigh the chick. Checking the habitat structure takes teamwork – someone needs to be outside blocking the entrance so the chick doesn’t run away (they can’t fly yet) and fall to the ground and get snapped up by a gull.
I didn’t take pictures of the different stages of development again because I’m still learning how to do this process of checking, classifying, weighing, banding, and reporting, and I don’t want to be an extra nuisance by snapping photos every few seconds. There are LOTS of sites to check and very little time to waste. It’s nice that Pete and Russ, the supervising biologists of the Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI), are so patient with a beginner like me and correct my mistakes without getting mad and help coach and guide me with some tricky techniques like banding. I know I said in a previous post that I banded a chick for the first time, but that was sort of a lie (I told you I’m a liar), because that was just a temporary band to remember which chick hatched first.
When the chick is mostly to fully feathered and has almost no down left, we band them with metal bands, which requires pliers and some technique so we don’t pinch the chicks. In this picture, the ends of the band have been pressed together, and its about to be clamped into a circle shape so it’s comfier for the bird and less likely to fall off. We banded lots of chicks today, and I got to band 2! Pete helped fix the first one I did since it was a tiny bit crooked, but the 2nd one I did turned out fine! yay!
Since the Rhinocerous Auklets (RHAU’s) and CAAU nests overlap quite a bit, we did them at the same time. We came across the first RHAU chicks today, and this is a picture (as promised, of the cutest chick EVER) of the only chick we were able to handle today (we don’t handle them if an adult is present as it causes them to abandon the site). This one is a really little guy and is completely downy – no feathers had come in yet! What a puffball =)
For reference, this is what an adult RHAU looks like, I got this image off a google search. See the “horn” on its bill? These guys are WAY bigger than the Cassin’s Auklet.