The work schedule on the Farallones is definitely not a 9-5 job. Our schedule is dictated by the birds’ schedule, which means sometimes we’re at the blind ready to start a diet watch at 6am, and sometimes out mist-netting from 11 pm to 1 am. Of course, it’s not always like that everyday, but today was a longer day for me, starting at 7am in the Murre Blind doing Diet Watch with Pete and Michelle.
Diet Watch started today. Murre diet watch is at the Murre Blind, every day starting today. Today was the 7-9 am shift, and basically we watch the murres bring in juvenile fish to feed their chicks, and through our binoculars, identify the type of fish (anchovy, rockfish, sardine, smelt, flatfish, etc), how large it is in relation to the beak (if its the same length as the beak it’s 1.0), which breeding site it went to, and if the bird is banded, the banding color combination. We record everything on a little Palm Pilot which is super helpful.
Sighting the birds coming in with a fish isn’t that easy, especially when multiple birds all with fish come in at the same time! Especially when the plot looks like this —–>
Actually, that’s about a third of Shubrick Point’s murres, my lens isn’t wide-angle enough to capture them all, but we just concentrate on about 300 sites in one small area closest to the cliff face.
Tomorrow, there will be a 9-11 diet watch shift, then tuesday will have an 11-1 shift, and so forth, ending with a 5-7 shift on friday, and keep rotating through this for about a month, interspersed with 3 all-day diet watches, which last from 6am to 8pm on the same day.
After this, I continued to work on X-plot, some of those birds are really stubborn and don’t move….ever…..
Then, the US Fish and Wildlife people followed us around collecting feather samples from the Cassin’s Auklets chicks that have reached the “fully-feathered” stage to analyze potential contamination from the environment. After they had enough samples, Pete, Jessie, Katrina, Michelle, and I continued to do the 5-day checks on the Cassin’s Auklets(CAAU) and Rhinocerous Auklets (RHAU). I handled an adult RHAU today, which is kind of challenging because they’re quite large and like to bite and it gave me a piece of its mind..erm… or rather, waste. Again, because the areas of the island that have the CAAU and RHAU boxes kind of overlap, we did the two studies concurrently.
Today was the first time in two weeks that Michelle and Katrina got to see the Cassins chicks since they were downy-feathered, and got to see the rhino chicks for the first time ever. Michelle was enamored and took a lot of pictures, so she took a picture of me with one of the youngest Cassin’s newly hatched downy-feathered chicks.
Also, I don’t know if you can quite see it, but my Pacific Seabird Group 2010 hat is now officially seabird – i got a good splattering across the front and brim today.
then, i did my elephant seal re-sighting, which didn’t take too long, since the Zalouphus (California sea lions) took over one of the spots that the Mirounga (elephant seals) like to hang out.
Then I went to the Sea Lion Cove blind to do a new daily task – re-sighting Brandt’s Cormorants. Right now, there aren’t too many Brandts at the SLC blind since a lot of the Zalophus (CA sea lions) chased them off after their first attempt to breed, but I got a couple good pictures of the two postures the males make when they’re doing a “courtship display”:
First, it arches its head back, fans out its tail feathers as erect as possible, and while flapping its wings in a paddle-like pattern,
stretches its neck forward, all the while showing off its bright iridescent blue pouch underneath its beak. Pretttyyy cool, even after you’ve seen it a hundred times.
Anyway, the Brandt’s resighting has to happen when the sun sets, because that’s when they return to the colony, so I was at the blind until around 7:30, then came home for dinner! Thanks for cooking again US Fish & Wildlife people!
That’s all for today,
Love, Kristina