From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

Right now we are experiencing the busiest time of year for the Southeast Farallon Island! The past couple weeks have been filled with chicks popping out of their eggs, which was really cute and fluffy, but as threshold numbers are reached, we begin Diet Watches for several species.  Last post, I talked about Murre Diet Watch.  Last night, we started Rhinocerous Auklet Diet Monitoring, and Thursday we begin Pigeon Guillemot Diet Watch.  All of this on top of our regular assignments! We’re all kinda pooped.

Yesterday, we said goodbye to new friends Kevin and Cathy of US Fish and Wildlife, who were here for 2 days doing contamination research, and Zach of US Fish and Wildlife and his girlfriend Zoe, who had stayed here for a week doing maintenance work.

Yesterday was very busy for everyone – my schedule included X plot in the morning, Murre diet watch from 9am – 11am, helping with the landing to get Kevin, Cathy, Zach and Zoe and all their stuff onto their boat, doing Pigeon Guillemot Breeding Check most of the afternoon, doing daily checks on my Cassin’s Auklets after that, and Brandt’s Cormorants Resighting around sunset, helping put together a communal dinner, then doing Rhinocerous Auklet netting and processing from 2100-2330.

A lot of the Pigeon Guillemots (PIGU) are hatching at the same time! During my check I had 2 pipping eggs and one hatching right out of its egg.  Of course I had to get a picture.  The eggs are marked A and B because when they were discovered on a previous breeding check, they were found at the same time, so we don’t know which one was laid first (if we did we would label them 1 and 2).

Rhino netting is really really cool (or maybe that’s because I’ve only done it twice so far… it might get old after we do it a dozen times but I doubt it).

First, we assign roles.  Pete always does data processing, but us 4 interns switch around the other roles.  2 people are on Rhino patrol, meaning they get a hold of the bird after its hit the net (which is a little difficult since the Rhinos are pretty feisty, strong, and bigger than a football), 1 person is on fish duty, meaning they collect all the fish that the Rhino had in its beak but dropped on impact and put it into a little baggie (Rhinos have these serrations in the roof of their beak that can hold fish there, they can hold about 8 juvenile fish at a time), and one person helps Pete with data processing (which includes getting measurements on the bird like wing cord, weight, beak size, band number), bands them if they’re unbanded, and then helps Pete launch them back into the air (they need a really good throw to get back flying).

When we wait for birds to hit the net, we have to lie down quietly by the sides of the net with our headlamps turned off, and I was a little apprehensive at first since I’m so prone to flea bites from the gull fleas, but last night, with the setting sun behind the cliffs and the bright moon in the sky and all the birds flying to and from sea all around us and calling to each other, and the stars getting brighter and brighter as the night got darker, I became pretty sure I have one of the coolest jobs on the planet.

The Rhino netting ends once 5 Cassin’s Auklets hit the net.  So, even though the net is intended for Rhinos, sometimes other birds don’t see it and get caught and need to be disentangled and let go.  Our rule is to take down the net once 5 Cassins hit it because its usually about then that suddenly TONS of Cassins will come in and we just end up getting really backloaded disentangling them and with our lights on, the Rhinos won’t hit the net (and if they somehow didn’t see us, it’d really hurt to have them accidentally fly into us at the speed they’re going).

After netting, we take all the fish and record the species, the standard length (length from mouth to end of backbone), the fork length (length from mouth to inside fork of the tail), and mass.  Thus, this study is two-fold: it’s both mark re-capture and diet monitoring.

On a side note, the Western Gull chicks have experienced some mass carnage.  I’m not doing any of the WEGU plots, but everyone else is and they’re reporting at least 80% disappearance in their plots of eggs or chicks that were there on a previous check.  There are lots of dead chicks lying around, which is pretty depressing.  Those that made it past their most vulnerable stage are starting to run around like toddlers with their WEGU parents chasing them around.  This picture is of a gull chick that’s starting to run around, but isn’t quite big enough to be completely safe from predation. Even chicks this size can get pecked in the head, though it isn’t nearly as common as the really little chicks getting fully swallowed.  I’m not sure I can ever eat chicken nuggets again.

Anyway, we’ll be doing Rhino netting for 4 nights in a row then 6 nights off then 4 nights on, and so forth, for the next 30 days or so, so my nights will be a little busy!

That’s all for now,

Love, Kristina

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

Living on the Farallon Island means no grocery stores, no post office, no Target, no newspaper boy, no PG&E, no DMV, and no chinese takeout.  To restock on food & propane, to take off trash & recycling, and to switch out personnel, the Farallon Islands depend on the “Farallon Patrol”.  The Farallon Patrol are a group of volunteers that sign up to bring people and gear to and from the island, a run of which happens every other Saturday.  They generously give us their time and expertise and the use of their boat for a chance to set foot on the island and essentially help us do what we do.

Today was the first time I have experienced a Farallon Patrol run as a resident of the island.  On Saturdays we also do all the house chores, so we all got up early to get our chores done so that we would have time to still get all our work done, and for Russ and Annie, to have time to pack for their two weeks off.

I signed up for dealing with trash and doing house laundry.  We pre-sort our garbage into compost, recyclable, burnable, and non-either.  The recyclables and non-either get packed into action packers that go on the boat back to the mainland, and the burnables (paper, cardboard, used toilet paper [since our plumbing cant really handle that]) get burned. This is the brick pit I burned the burnable trash in.  The compost goes in a big compost box behind the house.

Also, we’re almost entirely powered by solar energy! The only time we use the generator is when we have to use the crane.

Then I went to the Murre Blind to continue to try to confirm breeding sites for X plot (like everyday), when the boat arrived a little before noon – more than 2 hours early! I rushed back to East Landing, where the crane is, to help unload stuff and help with the landing.  Jessie and I learned how to operate the crane.

Jessie got to operate the crane a little today, since Pete had to drive the safe boat to take Russ and Annie out to the boat.  Today’s skipper was Al Divittorio.  Thanks for volunteering Al!

This is Jessie at the switchboard, and in the background is Zach from US Fish and Wildlife, on his cell phone.  He must have Nextel because that’s the only cell phone coverage we get out here.

The boat brought us 4 people! Interns Katrina Olthoff and Michelle Goh have returned from a 2 week vacation (they had been here for 6-8 weeks previously) and we’ll all be working closely together.  The boat also brought Kevin and Cathy from US Fish and Wildlife, who are analyzing Cassins Auklet eggs for contaminants (they’ll be collecting samples from the fully-feathered chicks tomorrow when we do our daily checks to compare contaminats from the mother versus contaminants from the environment – they are good at chemistry).  They’ll only be staying for a 2 days, though, and leaving on a Coast Guard boat ( i think ).

After the landing of our new residents and departure of Russ and Annie, we put away all the groceries and mail they brought with them, had a quick lunch, and headed right back to work (including Katrina and Michelle).  Today, I had my daily Cassin’s Auklet check, and helped Michelle and Jessie do their Brandt’s Cormorant (BRCO) breeding site check at the Corm Blind.  As I’ll be doing more of this in the future I’ll elaborate in the future.

Anyway, today was quite busy and I was glad to get mail! My mom sent me a new rainjacket (since the one I have here is a quite large) and some tubes of hydrocortisone to help soothe the millions of flea bites I’m getting from the gull fleas.  I also received a fabulous post card from my friends Zack Mattler and Zan Gutowski! Getting mail is GREAT!

Well, tomorrow is the first day of diet watch, and Michelle, Pete, and I have the 7am – 9am shift, so I need to study up on my juvenile fish and get some rest! Katrina and Michelle are wayyy passed out.  They had to get up around 3 am today.. yikes!

More tomorrow!

Love, Kristina

Though the Western Gull is by far not the most populous bird on the island (about 18,000 this year), they certainly have the largest presence due to their unchecked aggression and choice to nest anywhere and everywhere.

As adults get hungry, many cannibalize the chicks in neighboring nests, and some chicks don’t get fed enough and end up just dying.  About 1 out of 10 survive to fledge, but this year it looks like it’ll be less.  Russ, one of the biologists on the island, has a suspicion that the gulls choosing to eat their own species may be an indicator of environmental conditions in the ocean – if there’s not enough productivity out at sea, there’s a tasty snack nearby.

At first I had a hard time adjusting to the gull’s screaming, pooping, and dive-bombing, but I realized that it’s just daily life on the Farallones.  It’s really their island, and they know it, so their attempt to protect the small chances of their young’s survival can be understood if not fully justified (there are a few out there… that have a really fiesty attitude)

I thought I’d dedicate a picture post to the WEGU’s, since the clothes I wear have a coating in their guano.

A nest of 3 eggs, one is pipping! See the egg tooth?

Sometimes the eggs are predated, like this gooey mess was.

This is a hatchling.  It’s just finished getting itself out of its egg and is still wet from the insides.  After a few hours it puffs up into a ball of cuteness.  Right here, its still pretty ugly.

This is a little nest of three downy-feathered chicks! It’s not the greatest picture, I was in a rush and their mom wasn’t too happy I was loitering near her babies

This is a dead chick right outside its nest.  I chose a relatively non-gruesome since I deal with enough regurgitations from this species already.

If they’re lucky enough to survive to adulthood… they’ll probably come back to the island to make more baby chicks!

Things are about to get really busy here on the island with 3 different diet watches all starting pretty much concurrently.  I’ll try to keep posting regularly!

Love, Kristina

Even though I’ve only been here for eleven days, I feel like I’ve been on the Farallon Island for many weeks.  I’m still learning new protocols every day, but also getting all my other responsiblities into a routine.  The last couple days were mostly routine, and I’m not double-checking myself every other second or asking questions left and right anymore, so I’m more comfortable taking pictures of what’s going on.  I thought I’d share a few from yesterday and today!

These are some Pigeon Guillemots (PIGU).  Their call is a kind of long whistling that rollercoasters up and down octaves.  They’re evolved for water and diving, so they fly kind of funny – they rapidly beat their wings and their feet awkwardly dangle behind them.  I was doing the PIGU re-sight study, where I look for PIGUS’s with bands on their legs, and record the color combination that they have (they’ll have up to 4 different colored bands).  None of the ones in this picture are banded.

The murre with its beak nestled in the feathers of the sitting murre is preening its mate.  They’re one of the few birds that preen each other, and look very caring and affectionate when they do.  They’ll preen their neibhors too if their mate’s not around.

Every morning I watch “X-plot”, an area of the cliff face with boundaries designated in our pictures and drawings of it, that has about 160 birds at any given time, about 120 of them at a breeding site, of which I have to determine whether or not is being used as a breeding site or just a hang out spot, by recording any seen eggs at any site.  I haven’t got a picture of one showing off its egg, because they really like to stay as still as a statue and hide their eggs, which can make it difficult to figure out who’s a breeder and who’s just hanging out…

like this guy!

and sometimes a murre is hanging out nearby its mate, which can be adorable but sometimes they can block your view! this one decided to shake out the dust in its wings for a second.

Murres are seriously cool.  The insides of their mouths are yellow, which you can see a lil bit in this photo.

It can get reallyyyy chilly up on the Murre Blind, also known as Shubrick Point.  This is me outside of the blind on the rock next to it, in my sweater, north face fleece, rainjacket, neck gator, beanie, and ski gloves.  The hood looks kind of funny because there’s a pom-pom on my beanie that makes it stick up which makes me look silly.  Annie took this of me and I had no idea until I was going through my pictures tonight and saw it!

All together we checked on Cassin’s Auklets and Rhinocerous Auklets.  We weigh them inside the buckets so that the wind won’t mess up our readings.  This is Russ carrying the bucket, on the trail to North Landing.  At least 3 chicks have fledged as of today! Cool!

I also did a PIGU breeding site check, where I basically went to crevices that are known to have been breeding sites for PIGUS’s and check to see if there are eggs, if there’s an adult bird incubating something, if there are chicks, or if there is nothing.  It was really cool to do the check on my own for the first time, since Pete has been with me the two previous times to show me all the sites at least once (this check has to be covered by 2 people, each taking half since there are SO many sites, and Annie and I alternate which half every 5 days).  The site check brings me basically rock-climbing up the lichen-covered granite of lighthouse hill, and I was doing the check from 3-6, and I’m mostly concentrating on my footing so I don’t step on a loose rock or a gull nest, the holds, finding the next site, and avoiding getting pooped on or jabbed in the head by a gull (though it’s kind of inevitable and I’ve accepted it as daily life here), but once or twice I stopped and enjoyed the view:

That’s all for now!

Love, Kristina

Lots ‘o stuff happened today!

The first of the Cassin’s chicks in the PRBO study fledged today!

I did my laundry today, which is kind of a gamble because you have to hang it up outside to dry, where the gulls might poop on it, but it’s windy enough that it dries pretty quickly.

I also found a new breeding site for the Ashy Storm Petrels today. I did my site search around the helicopter pad (helo pad), pictured below:

it’s mostly taken over by gulls now.  I carried around the boom box playing the call of the Ashy Storm Petrel (ASSP) and listened for them to call back, and once I found one, I marked the rocks surrounding the site with 3 dots of orange spray paint for Jessie to confirm with her flexible neck camera, and it gets documented for future ASSP studies.  Here were my tools:

There is electric tape holding the cassette player because a few years ago someone dropped this boom box down either lighthouse hill or a gulch (about 250 feet) and its a little janky now.  Occasionally I have to open it up and wiggle the tape around so it works.  But today was a success! I found a new site!

I also did the elephant seal watch today, which was productive.  The gulls nearby enjoyed using me for target practice.  It was harmless, though smelly.  I’m starting to warm up to them.  Did you know only up to about 1 chick in 3 nests (each nest 1-3 eggs laid) will survive to fledge (on a really good year)?

Here is a Western Gull (WEGU) with its 3 chicks.  The carnage that occurs concurrently with the hatching of chicks is kind of sad… most of these chicks will get gobbled up by neighbors, or even their own parents if mom and dad are hungry enough… or have bad memory.  As the chicks multiply, so do their carcasses.

Anyway, on a cheery note,

I saw an American Lady today!

The American Lady is native to Marin County, I’m pretty sure. There are no butterflies actually from the Farallon Island, they just wander out here occasinally.  I miss seeing flowers, as there are none here.  Will someone out there take a picture of neat flower nearby and send that picture to me? I really do miss flowas.

Also, exciting development: We have visitors on the island!

Zach, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and his girlfriend Zoe, are staying for the next week to do some work on the island getting rid of the Spinach that grows here (it’s an invasive species that is wreaking havoc on some of the native vegetation, see Eleanor’s post from last year here).  They’ve been here before so most of Farallon life is not new for them. Our species population has grown from 5 to 7. They’re staying in the Coast Guard House but we do dinner together, which meant I cooked for 7 tonight (which means I cooked for more than 7, as field biologists tend to eat more than normal people after a day’s work)

So, I made dinner today!

The menu: breaded potatote wedges, asparagus with a secret family sauce, and a pumpkin pie with whipped cream! All of these were first-time creations, so I was pretty pleased that nothing exploded and everything was rather tasty.  The pumpkin pie was a little confusing, because I made the pie crust from scratch and fumbled the execution, so there was no actual side crust to the pie, but it did have a bottom! And for some reason the pie kept staying jiggly after it was in the oven for more than the right amount of time at more than the right temperature – the dang recipe didn’t SAY to let it cool to firm, but we eventually figured it out =)

also, here’s a picture of a Tufted Puffin (TUPU) that I took yesterday:

They’re one of the 13 breeding seabirds on the island, but their breeding grounds are really inaccessible and it would cause too much disturbance to a number of species in order to do any hands-on studies with the puffins, so they’re not studied as much.

I didn’t do much yesterday, but since it was such a beautiful day, I could see the entire coastline! I saw the Golden Gate Bridge and Mt. Diablo from the Murre Blind! I think that’s noteworthy.  Also, since the weather was so nice, a ton of people came to the island to fish – illegally.  There’s not much we can do except to call the violations in and report them, and let enforcement handle the situation back on the mainland, but it’s really frustrating to see so many people coming to a wildlife refuge and recreationally take away a food source that almost the entirety of a species is feeding upon, especially when it’s specifically illegal to fish around the Southeast and North Farallon Islands.

STOP FISHING ROUND HERE PLZ K THANKS!!! The murre chicks are about to hatch and they’re in a lot bigger need of those fish than us stinky humans are.

K I just finished doing the dishes and today’s my shower day so I’m going to go celebrate that.

Love, Kristina

These past 24 hours have included a lot of time devoted to Cassin’s Auklets.

Last night, at 9:15, Russ, Annie, Pete, Jessie and I headed out to some cave entrances where Cassin’s Auklets (CAAU) like to nest.  We were collecting a diet sample.  We basically would wait at the entrance in the total darkness, and wait for a CAAU to come flying in and then catch it, upon which the bird would start regurgitating into a readied baggie, and to get the whole sample, we’d massage the throat from stomach to beak so it’d regurgitate a complete sample.  The entire process is called “barfing”, as in, “let’s go barf the Cassin’s!”.  It was a little difficult because the CAAUs would come barreling toward the cave entrance from around the corner and it’s maneuvariblity isn’t the greatest (it’s wings have evolved/are built for diving more so than flying) so they would mostly smack into us and then as soon it fell to the floor or we’ve got a decent grip, will immediately start barfing (usually all over your gloves or clothes) so you have to be pretty quick with the baggie to collect the sample.  The diet study calls for about 10 samples per week.  Last night I think we got 9.  I didn’t get any pictures beacause first of all, it was really dark, and second of all, the blinding light of the flash would have really confused and freaked out the birds, which we don’t want to do.

Today, I watched X-plot again for more murres.  You know, I learned in Human Sexuality, a popular class at Pomona, that bonobos and humans are rare in the animal kingdom for their enjoyment of sex outside of its reproductive value.  However, the murres really like doing it to and at this date, it’s really late to be laying eggs, let alone attempt to make one, but they’re still getting it on frequently, and take their sweet time too! I only mention this because this one amorous couple was blocking my view for the split second one murre, whose egg I have been trying to confirm, decided to preen itself and most likely exposed its bright greenish blue speckled egg… I’m not bitter.

Then, I did my daily checks on the Cassin’s in the PRBO study, and did the wing watch for Ashy Storm Petrels (ASSP), and didn’t find any ashy wings, but did find some CAAU chicks freshly regurgitated by some Western Gulls (WEGU).

Immediately after that, I joined the rest of the gang with the known-age study of the Cassin’s Auklets.  This study follows about 400 nest sites, most of which we checked today.  This is a 15- day check, and the purpose is to document which birds that were born here come back and breed again.  We banded every chick that was big enough to band and looked for adults incubating eggs, and if the adult was banded, then we took some measurements (beak size, wing chord, egg width and length), and if the adult wasn’t banded, then just noted the presence of an egg.  Today we banded a whopping 170 chicks! According to Russ, that’s an HUGE number (it sure felt like a lot) and it might even surpass the summation of the previous 8-10 years of banded chicks in the known-age study.

Banding the chicks is relatively simple, after you get the hang of it.  However, it’s not easy, as the chicks aren’t always entirely cooperative.  They poop on you as much as they can (remember to not put their rear facing your face), they peck at your fingers (if they’re extra fiesty), and their little toes have massive claws that resemble tiny talons.  Also, I’m probably exaggerating.

but I’m not exaggerating about the guano.  These little guys can be big squirters! Mostly, though, my gloves and pants took the brunt of the blows.  This is a picture of my pants, that were still mostly clean before today, about half-way through banding the known-age study chicks.

Poopy poopy pants.

This was exhausting, but none of us were done for the day! Saturday is cleaning day, so we all signed up to clean different areas of the house.  Since I woke up the latest, I took the last available slot: washing the windows.  The sea-spray really salts up the windows and the guano doesn’t improve visibility either! So it’s important to wash the windows once a week so we can see outside.

That’s all for today! Everyone’s exhuasted so we’re all about to go to bed.

Also, the USA tied with England! yeah!

Love, Kristina

Written by Ali Corley

On our last trip to Santa Barbara Island this May, we did an extra survey of fish abundancy and diversity on the Osborne shelf in addition to the usual bird observations and net tows on the regular transects.  Well, in other words, we spent several extra hours on top of the shelf for a fishing break! 

me with my first catch of the day!

The captain of the Alguita, Charlie, has been known for his impressive, and sometimes unconventional, cooking skills and he arranged the fishing break so that we could catch a fresh dinner.  I had never been fishing in the ocean and didn’t really know how it worked, but Charlie was a good teacher.  He brought out several poles and everyone had a chance to fish.  We put our lines in the water so that they sunk to the bottom of the very shallow underwater bank called the Osborne shelf.  We used squids for bait and once the lines reached the bottom, we waited.  Luckily (or maybe it was expert fishing skill and knowledge on Charlie’s part), we didn’t have to wait long.  All of a sudden, people were pulling fish in left and right.  Professor K was a real fishing pro and caught more fish than anyone else.  Darrell proved that he didn’t need to trick a fish into eating his hook when he snagged a tiny fish by the fin to pull it in.  Also,  I think Nik might have caught the world’s smallest fish. Everyone was successful at fishing.  Even I caught a couple fish.  After we had caught a whole bucket full of fish, we finished the transect and anchored in the bay. 

Prof K with a Sheepshead fish. It was the biggest catch of the day.

That night, we all helped prepare the best meal of the trip.  We chopped up fresh salsa with many of the vegetables grown in Charlie’s own backyard garden.  Charlie filleted, battered, and fried the fish and we ate delicious fish tacos with tortillas, beans and nopales.  For dessert, we peeled several hundred loquats and baked them in a savory loquat cobbler.  Needless to say, I think we all went to bed extremely full.  The next morning, we left Santa Barbara Island for the last time this year.  All our samples are collected, all the bird observations completed, and the field season is officially over after three trips to SBI.

Me and Nik on the back deck of the Alguita with SBI in the background.

I’m running out of relevant titles that won’t be repetitive. bear with me as they get cornier and cornier.

Today was a long day!

First, I went up to the Murre Blind and checked for eggs at X-plot again.  It gets more and more exciting to see a new egg because now I’m down to the individuals that like to stay still and not fidget, or are obscured by other birds/rock, so it takes much more patience to sit and watch the same one for a long time.  I’ll eventually get some close-up pictures of Murres for y’all, but I need to work on determining which spots are being used for breeding sites first.  Today the wind was 30-35 knots again which first of all makes it hard to keep your binoculars still for a stable view, and second of all, it gets stinkin’ cold! Most of the murres I’m on now are obscured behind a rock so I can’t see them from the blind, so I need to go outside on a rock nearby and watch them, and every hour or so go back into the blind and defrost and wipe the tears and snot from my face.  Beautiful, I know.

Then, my next task was to check on the Cassin’s Auklet chicks that we banded yesterday.  These chicks are checked on daily until they fledge, which is determined by two consecutive checks that show an absence of the chick.  For today, all the chicks that were banded yesterday were still there.  Though I didn’t have to weigh or band any of them, today was more difficult because I was by myself, and the WEGUs are more aggressive with a smaller groups of people, or in this case, a single person.

It’s definitely become time to wear the hard hats full time! Today I got jabbed in the head at least 3 times and pooped on once (these gulls have pretty good aim).  The hood of my rainjacket now has a little hole where the beak tore the material – good thing I was wearing a hard hat!

After the CAAU check, Pete taught me how to find all the sites for the other half of the Pigeon Guillemot (PIGU) breeding sites check, and we got several chicks AND new eggs! He said it’s a little late for them to be hatching eggs so it was not expected though not terribly strange.  Poor Pete got REALLY pooped on – twice!

The PIGU sites took us up Lighthouse Hill, so Pete cleaned the webcam while we were up there since the view is getting obscured by all the sea spray.  I waved at the cam.  The time was 2:50 so if you saw a person waving, that was me!

Lastly, I went to do elephant seal (Mirounga) re-sights.  I was only able to confirm one of the tags, because the way they lay down sometimes hides their tags.  I waited for over half an hour to read the tag on the seal at the very bottom of this picture and the seal second to the top.  They would once every ten minutes or so twitch but not enough for me to read their tags =(

i guess they were sleepy!

I not only need to identify the tag, but I need to record which flipper it’s on (left or right), and between which digits the tag is located.  If you look at this picture of it’s flipper, you’ll see that one side is more squarish than the other.  The flipper is made of five digits, like our five toes, and the tag can be pierced in one of the four spaces in between the digits.  If it’s closest to the squarish “toe”, it’s called “square”.  If it’s closest to the other round toe, it’s called “round”. If it’s in the middle on the “square” side, it’s called “square bar”, and similarly for the last remaining possibility, “round bar”.  In this picture, the right flipper is almost fully covering the left flipper, which had a tag, but as it remained in this position for the entire time I was there, except minor twitching, I was unable to record the re-sighting because I can only record a re-sight if I can read the tag and be 100% CONFIDENT that I’m reading it right.  Oh silly mirounga, you’re such a tease!

Nearby were some California sea lions (Zaloufus) (i probably misspelled that).   They were making a racket! They’re barely a third of the size of the elephant seals.

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This was a baby zalouphus hanging out nearby, for those of you that like to follow this blog only to see adorable wildlife!

Anyway, that’s what I did today! Today I also got to shower, which I did right after the e-seal resight.  It feels soooo good to shower.

Russ is cooking up some dinner! I saw him shredding some potatoe and he said something about guacamole, and Annie is making a banana cake thing with chocolate…. just typing this is making me HUNGRYYYYY

More tomorrow!

Love, Kristina

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.