I thought I’d try to get a few pictures for today’s blog post!
So every day I watch “X plot” to try to confirm breeding sites. This means I watch a specified area of the cliff where Common Murres tend to hang out every day during the breeding season, and record which birds have used their little nook or cranny, the “site”, to incubate an egg and hatch a chick, and which are just hanging out there with no eggs.
This bird is standing up, exposing the underside of the egg, which would mean that I can confirm that there it is used as a “breeding site”. The purpose of following breeding site is to help calculate the correction factor to estimate total populations after the species’ census is taken. To the right and on a lower rock is another Murre standing on top of its chick – you can just see the top of its dark head.
There he is! and bird on the left is checking out its egg. “Are you hatching yet?!? C’mon, I got fish to feed you! All the other chicks are hatching, why are you so slow?? Get cute now!” that last part may or may not be what I’m saying to the eggs.
Also, gull chicks have taken over the island! sort of.
after a certain age (a week or two after hatch), they become what we like to call “runners”, and they run all over the place!
these guys are on the young side of “runner”
these are a couple of the largest i’ve seen yet. mom is standing nearby, obviously, as even chicks as big as these can get attacked (we saw one about this size almost get its neck broken by an aggressive adult nearby, but it got away! whew!)
also, we did our five-day check on the known-age study of the Cassin’s Auklet, the PRBO study of the Cassin’s Auklet, and the Rhino Breeding Check.
Here’s Michelle with a Rhinocerous Auklet chick! This one is real young and is still covered in down! (Downy-feathered chick)
After this, I helped cover Jessie doing Brandt’s Cormorants re-sighting (where I sit in a blind and scope out the letter/number combinations of bands on BRCO’s hanging out/roosting/preening/sleeping/copulating/sitting/gathering nest material in a certain area of the island), since she had to do Murre Diet Watch from 5-7, which is usually when she does the re-sighting.
This was our first night of no night work since sunday, so we celebrated by watching a movie in the Coast Guard house next door! We watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” which was pretty entertaining. The WEGU’s were featured in the movie, but depicted so much more viciously than they really are – even here. (The movie takes place in Bodega Bay, by the way)
Anyway, we’re all pretty tired out here, but we might get a VIP visit from the head of NOAA tomorrow, depending on the weather!
Updates soon,
Love, Kristina