From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

A little background: Most of the days during the week Charlotte and I drive to our MAPS station to do habitat surveys, bird censuses and banding. To get there, we turn right on the big main road, drive for a long time, turn right on the cornwell ranch road and navigate a confusing network of gravel roads and two tracks to get to our creek. Within the first 2 minutes of our drive while we are still on the main road, we leave Glasgow. On the outskirts of town, we see some hills on the right. On top of these hills are these mysterious creations:

Mystified? So are we. What we have managed to learn about these things can be summarized as follows:

-The guy who makes them is named Buck Samuelsen

-He sells them

-Someone in Glasgow bought one (its outside a store)

-They are made of old oil drums and other scrap metal

In any case, they are a cool addition to the scenery along highway 2. Hooray public art installations!

Well, today is my last day on the Farallon Islands, and I honestly cannot believe that the last eight weeks has gone by so quickly. I’ve spent today tying up loose ends, packing, and doing my various studies–rhino daily checks and PIGU breed.

Tomorrow, Hannah and I will be boarding “Mi Vida,” a 42′ sailing yacht whose skipper is a member of the volunteer Farallon Patrol, and heading out to Alameda, where the boat docks.  Then we will unload all of the trash and recycling from the island and drive up to the PRBO offices to finish cleaning things up.

In some ways, I am ready to go home–I want to eat ice cream, see Harry Potter, little things like that.  In other ways though, I know I’m really going to miss this place.  Just two days ago, for example, twelve Humpback Whales parked themselves in Fisherman’s bay and proceeded to feed en masse for over an hour.  Watching animals that huge and that close is an amazing experience.  This whole island is an amazing experience, and I am truly fortunate that I got the opportunity to come here for so long, to work with the people (and the animals!) here, and to see all the things that I have seen.  It has been the greatest experience of my life, and certainly a formative one.

The forecast tomorrow is for smooth sailing, so I can only hope the weather holds.  By tomorrow evening, I will be back in civilization, dealing with traffic, waiting in line, and other people.  It certainly will be different!

Well, that’s all for now.

Best,

Eleanor

This morning, Amy and I went prospecting for another potential MAPS site. John suggested that we find a site both closer to town (obviating the need to wake up obscenely early to get to a far-away site by dawn), and closer to the major river to compare avian community composition at varying distances from a permanent running water source.

The main river here is the Milk River, so named (at least I think) because of its opaque—i.e. milky—color and quality. It’s a slow-moving river, so it makes for fantastic invertebrate breeding grounds, and as such, attracts many flycatchers and other insectivores. We chose to go to Faraasen (alternatively spelled Faraason) park, a tract of public land lying adjacent to the Milk.

We saw our first Belted kingfisher of the season at the park. Based on the rusty flanks and triangular patch on the upper breast, we identified it as either a female or a juvenile. It was perched close to the water, and when we approached, it quickly flew away. It has a magnificent crest and striking coloration. (A picture of a kingfisher in flight can be found here, courtesy of the National Parks Service: http://www.nps.gov/prsf/naturescience/images/belted-kingfisher1.jpg.)

We also saw quite a few (>10) bank swallows throughout the park and perched on telephone wires running through the grassland flanking the park. They are North America’s smallest swallow (according to David Sibley), and they were being hassled by two very bold Eastern Kingbirds. Amy and I have noticed that the Eastern Kingbirds around here have a fairly outgoing or foolhardy/courageous personality for they will perch and call very loudly, content to not fly away until you are within 5 or less feet of it. Charles Carlson—John’s father—has some great pictures of bank swallows here: http://www.pbase.com/mccownii/image/115477782 and here: http://www.pbase.com/mccownii/image/115477741.

All in all, this site was very productive, and it certainly appeared to have a higher proportion of insectivores. With any luck, this will be a MAPS station in 2010!

The Farallon Islands, like almost every island that has experienced human presence or traffic, have a pretty serious problem with invasive plants.  The worst of these invasives, by far, is the New Zealand Spinach.

New Zealand Spinach is a spinach, as in, you can eat it, but the one time it was ever served out here, I hear it was awful–really salty.  However, a recent report on NPR which focused on “urban scavengers” did include an interview with a guy who claims it’s really tasty.  Well, maybe, but at least not out here.  In addition, the spinach is a really awful, annoying plant.

As you can see, it’s a very dense plant, and it’s dense root-structure interferes with the ability of burrowing birds (out here Cassin’s Auklets and Rhinocerous Auklets) to build their burrows.  In addition, it chokes out the Farallon Weed, the main endemic plant out here.

The war against spinach is somewhat of a Catch 22.  Around this time of year, the end of July, the spinach plants go to seed, each one dropping hundreds of tiny seeds.  Once a plant has seeded, it’s almost not worth trying to pull it up, because the damage has been done.  So, then, it seems that the obvious thing to do would be to try to pull the spinach before it seeds, possibly even as early as June.  The problem with this plan is that so many of the areas on the island are completely off-limits in June.  Pulling spinach would cause immeasurable damage and disturbance to the breeding seabird populations, so there’s almost no way to keep a lot of the plants from dropping seeds.

Before I continue my story, one thing you have to understand is that the entirety of Southeast Farallon Island is a wildlife refuge.  There are, however, wilderness areas on the island that pretty much no one is allowed into.  One of these wilderness areas, over by North Landing, hasn’t been visited by PRBO staff for probably around 20 years.  This year, however, we’ve noticed from far away that a lot of large mats of spinach were cropping up in the area.  So, we got permission from the refuge manager to head over there and pull the spinach.  This turned out to be very complicated.

First of all, getting to the area would be simple, except for the fact that a bunch of Pelagic Cormorant nests sprang up right in the clearest path to the area, so we couldn’t go that way.  Instead, we decided to take the long way around, up Lighthouse Hill, down the ridge, across a couple of other ridges, and into the wilderness area.  This is a LONG, DIFFICULT, and relatively dangerous path, since for the majority of it you’re creeping along cliff faces trying not to dislodge the mixture of loose rocks and gravel (“scree”) that make up the body of Lighthouse Hill.  In addition, Fish and Wildlife protocol stated we had to bleach our shoes before heading over there, AND we had to bring all the spinach we pulled out in bags.  (Normally, when we pull spinach, we just turn it upside down on a rock and let it dry out.  Not this time though.)

It took about half an hour to walk over to the wilderness area, and once there, a couple of hours to pull all the spinach.  Lots of the plants were in huge mats, with individual plants weighing around twenty pounds once we pulled them.

In addition to pulling the plants, we spent some time picking seeds out of the dirt, but this is a pretty hopeless task, since there’s no way we’ll ever get all the seeds.  Every little bit helps though!

Ultimately, we ended up with eighteen contractor bags full of spinach.  Limited by the number of bags we had brought, we stuffed them all very full, and each of them easily weighed between forty and fifty pounds.

Remember when I said that the trip over to the wilderness area was difficult?  Well, to put it mildly, it was NOT easier when lugging a forty pound bag of spinach on your back.  We ended up sort of daisy-chaining the bags as frequently as we could, passing them along from flat area to flat area.  Sometimes, though, we just had to buckle down and lug them fairly long distances with nowhere to stop.

The spinach work ended up taking about five hours, all afternoon, and left everyone more exhausted than I remember being since I got here.  Good thing I’m not cooking tonight!

Anyway, I can’t believe I’ve only got three days left here.  Over the next few days, I’ll be transferring my studies over to other people, to continue until they conclude.

Well, Hannah’s making thai coconut soup tonight, which is smelling delicious, and we’ll probably watch a movie tonight, since Rhino netting ended last night.  No night work tonight!!

That’s all for now.

Best,

Eleanor

This weekend, Charlotte and I finally made it out to Glacier National Park! Glacier is a spectacular place– if you’ve never been, I highly recommend it. Early on Friday morning (~7am) Charlotte, Lauren and Marisa (BLM summer interns) and myself were jamming ourselves and all our gear into Lauren’s subaru. Before we truly began our journey, we had to stop in Malta to pick up Spencer, another BLM intern who was coming with us. After we picked up Spencer we drove for another 5-6 hours across the prairie until the mountains popped into view. We went to the gate on the road to Many Glacier, a campsite recommended to us by a co-worker, but by that time it was already midafternoon and this popular campsite was full. We drove around and found ourselves another spot at Sun Point, pitched our tents and went out for a leisurely afternoon stroll to some local waterfalls. We walked about 4 or 5 miles and saw three waterfalls, an elk a mule deer (thanks john), and a chipmunk trying frantically to cover up a hole it had made in the middle of the trail while we stood about three feet away. Charlotte also found a caterpillar at war with some ants.

On the second day, we undertook a hike which would take us up to a lake, and which had an optional spur to a nice lookout through a tunnel. On our way up to the first lake (aptly named iceberg lake) we came across some fresh, still-wet bear (grizzly??) poop on the trail. I checked it out, and determined that it definitely had fur in it, along with what might have been berries and sticks at some point. Before starting our hike, we sprung for some bear spray ($45), but still we preferred not to run in to one.

We continued our journey, unfettered by bears, and saw some very cool flowers.

At last we arrived at our first destination, iceberg lake!

Charlotte, Lauren, Spencer and I decided that we wanted to keep hiking, and we headed off towards ptarmigan lake. We decided not to go all the way to ptarmigan tunnel because we had just made up our minds to hike to do a long hike to a glacier the next day, and we wanted to save our feet. It turned out that ptarmigan lake was nothing to write home about, but we did see some cool wildlife, including a marmot and a butterfly that landed on my hand.

After our hike that day (~13miles), we were tuckered out, so we decided to just drive around and check out the park. We drove up to logan pass and saw some mountain goats and bighorn sheep.

That night there was a ferocious thunderstorm, but it could not keep us awake, especially after the day we’d had. The next morning we were up bright and early again, hiking by 7:45 to see Grinnell Glacier. As far as we could tell, this 5.5 mile hike (11 round trip) is the shortest hike to a glacier in the park. There is an interesting little display at the trailhead with photos of the glacier over the past hundred years and some information about climate change. The hike was beautiful and not too too strenuous, with nice views of the glacier and a few lakes the whole way up. We also had to walk through a waterfall to get there and back, which was refreshing in the 80 degree weather.  This glacier is enormous (or so it looked to me, but perhaps it isn’t compared with what it used to be) and is definitely the biggest chunk of ice i’ve ever seen.

Last Wednesday (8/22 to be more precise) was our second to last banding day. The Institute for Bird Populations (IBP) which is the entity overseeing all MAPS banding stations stated that in periods 8 – 10, the young of the year will predominate in the catch. What this means—or should mean—for us is that we should be catching a higher raw amount (and most likely a higher proportion) of hatchlings.

In banding session 9, however, we only caught 2 hatchlings out of 14 captures. We’ve exceeded this capture rate of young in past sessions. What is notable though is that we are starting to see different species, and particularly, different species caught that are hatchlings.

We caught our first Northern Flicker that day, and it was also a juvenile (aka hatchling, young of the year, etc). Our first capture of a juvenile Brown Thrasher also occurred on that day. Earlier in the season, the majority of the juveniles captured were House wrens, with a few Western meadowlarks, and one juvenile Eastern Kingbird. All of the aforementioned birds are smaller (especially wrens), and thus our increased capture of larger birds in general, and larger juveniles in particular, could be an artifact of a longer time requirement to maturation.

In addition, the composition of birds that we’ve observed on our censuses and caught during banding runs has gradually been changing. Early in the season we observed a fair amount of shorebirds within the Cornwell Ranch property in its entirety and within the MAPS station itself. The shorebirds have mostly moved on by this point, having begun their arduous trek to their wintering grounds. We’ve been catching more and more larger birds and fewer flycatchers, in general—the exception being the Least Flycatcher that we caught last week, which was also our first catch for that species.

We’ll keep you posted on our tenth and final banding run, and if you see a killdeer at a southerly shore nearby, please say hi to it for us!

Well, it’s been a few days so I thought I ought to update about what’s been going on.  The last four or so days have been pretty odd–as I mentioned, the majority of the seabird work is drawing to a close, so we are left with a lot of odd jobs and data entry/proofing.  One might think that this would make the time drag, but it’s been just the opposite.  Despite the fact that I spent at least three hours a day for the last five days repairing mistnets, the time has flown.  I can’t believe it is already Saturday!

Saturday out here is chores day.  Seeing as there are six of us, there are six chores.  I’ll list them here for posterity: (1) Bathrooms–pretty self explanatory, just clean the bathrooms; (2) Floors–sweep and mop the entire house, pretty time-consuming; (3) Kitchen–this is the most labor-intensive job, involving cleaning out all three of the refrigerators and disposing of old food, cleaning counter tops, cleaning out the stove/oven, and basically anything else that needs doing in the kitchen; (4) Windows–between salt spray and bird guano, the windows get pretty dirty, so the windows get washed every week, at least the downstairs ones (with the upstairs, the washing is a little more sporadic); (5) Shoe Room/Tidy Up–Clean the shoe room and tidy up all over the house; (6) Compost/Recycle/Trash/Burn/House Laundry–basically, take care of all the waste.  Burn what can be burned, compost what we attempt to compost (although it doesn’t really get warm enough out here to work), place recyclables in action packers to be taken on the next boat, and then do all the communal laundry (sheets, napkins, dish towels, etc.).  Chores aren’t so bad, especially when the days aren’t too busy.

Today was also a five-day Rhinocerous Auklet chick check, meaning we went around to all of the inhabited boxes (the official deadline to stop checking empty boxes was only a few days ago) to weigh chicks, take wing cord measurements, and band any that are now big enough.  A few rhino chicks, like this one at left, are now mostly feathered, and big enough to band.  You can just see how the sleek black feathers on his face are starting to replace his fluffy down.  Very cute.

Banding rhino chicks means there are now some rhinocerous auklet daily checks, which have replaced my Cassin’s daily checks.  Only yesterday, my very last Cassin’s chick fledged, and so daily checks have finally stopped.  It feels weird not doing them, since I’ve done them every day since the second day I got here.  Also, last night we started our last round of rhino netting, so we’ll have nightwork for the next few nights.  We’re also trying to get in two more sessions of netting for Ashy Storm Petrels, but the weather is being wet and uncooperative.

Other than mending mistnets and proofing data, I’ve also been getting work done analyzing the TDR data from earlier this season.  I finally have some time to start writing material for the poster I will have to print once I get back to school.

Finally, I thought I’d put up a couple of pictures of my room, since I haven’t yet (although just because it was chores day does NOT mean my room is clean, so beware!!):

Alright, that’s all for now!  Thus begins my final week on the island.

Best,

Eleanor

Popo’ia Island isn’t far from Oahu Island. Photo by Max:

Some people call the island ‘Flat Island’ for obvious reasons. From a distance it is hard to tell what the things are that are sticking up. But when you get closer you can see that they are people!

People kayak and swim to the island. David and I went there with Jaap Eijzenga, a biologist with Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources-Dept. of Forestry and Wildlife. He is in charge of offshore island seabird sanctuaries. He has been restoring the native vegetation on the islands, protecting the native wildlife and working to rid the islands of their many introduced plants and animals.

The island is a limestone swiss cheese where wedge-tailed shearwaters and the smaller Bulwer’s petrels make their nests. On other islands like Manana Island, the wedge-tailed shearwaters dig out their burrows in soil. Due to the introduced vegetation that doesn’t hold the soil well, the birds can get buried in their own burrows. Some massive mudslides have occured after rains which have instantly trapped them. The birds at Popo’ia island have sturdier natural shelters.
Some of the shearwaters that we saw were sitting out in the open socializing. These birds were likely non-breeders that don’t have a mate or a nest site yet.
Some birds were courting each other by allopreening (grooming each other’s feathers).

A big thank you to Jaap who took the time to show us the island and to explain the restoration and monitoring work that he and many other volunteers have been doing on these precious tiny islands. For more information on the characteristics, threats to, and restoration work being on Popo’ia Island see the website of the Offshore Islet Restoration Committee.

This week I helped two graduate students of David Hyrenbach, Pam Michael and Andrew Titmus, perform necropsies on four seabirds that had been found dead on Tern Island. Tern Island is a small island in the French Frigate shoals northwest of the main Hawaiian islands. It is a home to many species of tropical seabirds, nesting green sea turtles and Hawaiian Monk seals. I spent a summer there years ago after graduating from college and Pomona student Matthew Barbour’06 went there after spending the summer on the Farallon Islands where Eleanor is currently. It’s possible that he found the birds we worked on!

We started with two young Tristam’s storm petrels.
These birds did not have all of their adult feathers; they died before leaving their nests. These chicks had recieved all of their food from their parents. The parents appeared to have been doing an OK job feeding them; they were really fat! One of the labels for one of the chicks said that a Bulwer’s petrel had taken over the burrow of the Tristam’s storm petrel. Perhaps the chick had been kicked out by the other bird.
When we opened up the stomachs of the Tristam’s storm petrels it was shocking to see that their stomachs were full of small plastic particles and even fishing line. It is possible that this plastic contributed to their deaths.
These birds live around 500 miles from any human population. Where did they get that plastic? Unfortunately, the Pacific Ocean is filled with plastic that is churning in a clockwise gyre. According to David Hyrenbach, the main concentration is between 30 – 35 degrees N almost in the center of the gyre. Storm petrels feed by picking up prey floating on the surface of the ocean. Their feeding strategy makes them really susceptible to ingesting small pieces of floating plastic.
Next we examined the stomachs of two adult black-footed albatross.

Andrew is investigating the quantity and type of plastic ingested by albatross. In addition to performing necropsies on dead birds, he dissects apart boluses (pellets of undigestible prey parts) regurgitated by albatross breeding on Midway Island and Kure Island, both leeward Hawaiian islands. In California, marine educators in the organization Oikonos are bringing albatross boluses into classrooms so that school children can see firsthand where plastic ends up. The two albatross that we dissected were full of flying fish eggs and squid beaks. Andrew is going to go through the contents to see if there were any plastic objects in there as well.

For two related posts, see Eleanor Caves’ post on ‘Gull Juju’ from the Farallon Islands project and my previous post ‘Operation Balloon Recovery’ from the Channel Islands Project.

Well, my last boat day has officially come and gone, and with it my roommate Jordan.  It’s a really weird thought to think that the next boat that lands here will be taking me away!  However, the season is definitely starting to slow down.  Murre work is completely finished, and we’ve started officially calculating their productivity this year, a depressing task.  Across the island, productivity will be near zero, the worst ever seen in a non-el Nino year (during el Nino, murre productivity often averages around 0.2).

Western Gulls, whose chicks are growing up very fast, are also winding down.  We’ve officially stopped monitoring nests that failed (whose chicks or eggs disappeared), and are now only working to re-sight chicks we banded this year, confirming via their unique metal band number that they are still alive, and recording the chicks’ feathering status.

Cassin’s Auklets, this year’s greatest success story, are also, at least for me, nearing an end.  I am down to only two chicks left on my daily chick checks, the rest have fledged.  Many of the nest boxes DO contain birds who are currently sitting on their second egg, but they are on what we call a “skip period,” where we don’t disturb them for a couple of weeks.  By the time the eggs hatch, or come off of skip, I will probably have left the island.

Rhinocerous Auklets and Pigeon Guillemot work, however, is still going strong.  Pigeon Guillemot diet watch continues to happen every three days, and because of recent foggy weather, we haven’t been able to do diet watch at one of our sites in almost 10 days.  To compensate for this, we are now going on “standby,” meaning that any day that isn’t foggy will automatically become a PIGU diet watch day, so that we can catch up on lost data from the site on Lighthouse Hill.

Rhino diet is still being monitored as well–we just finished up our third round of Rhino netting, and aside from an extremely hard bite on my finger, everything went really smoothly.  Although the Rhino in this picture may look incredibly tangled, seabirds this large are, for the most part, really easy to remove from the net.  The largest complication with rhinos stems from the fact that they have a very long tongue, and twice now, I’ve seen the net actually wrap around their tongues.  Removing birds who have been caught in this way can be VERY difficult, since you can actually rip their tongue out if their are removed incorrectly, and you still have to be wary around their really strong bills.

The diet of the Rhinos has also changed noticably as of late.  Whereas our first round of netting produced an abundance of Greenling, the last two rounds have seen diets of around 90% Pacific Saury.  As you can see in the picture, Saury vary greatly in size, weighing anywhere from just a few grams up to almost thirty.  We’ve also seen a lot of squid, and a few Myctophids, the deep sea fish, which are most often California Headlightfish or Blue Lanternfish.

My Pigeon Guillemot Breed study continues to take up at least a few hours every five days, and these chicks are really growing!  As I mentioned, they are often born in clutches of two, and unfortunately, very few Chick #2’s remain, most having been killed by their sibling or simply starved.  The chicks that are left, however, are growing very quickly, and we’ve even already seen our first fledge.  Believe it or not, the chick in this photo is the same chick that I pictured earlier in the season, although then he looked only like a tiny black puffball.  These chicks now weigh almost 400 grams, and so we’ve started banding them and checking their attendance daily, to monitor fledge dates.

Here is actually a picture of one of my only sites that still has two chicks in it.  As they get bigger and bigger, they look more and more uncomfortable wedged into their tiny crevices.  Every five days, I have to pull them out and weigh them, and it’s actually getting pretty difficult, since it’s hard to wrap my hand around them, and often hard to remove them from their wedged positions.

Finally, with the slowing down of the bird work, we’ve all had a chance to get some other types of work done.  A lot of maintenance goes in to keeping all of these buildings running, as well as maintaining all of the study boxes and plots, so over the last few days, I’ve been working on Cassin’s Auklet Box Shades.  These shades keep our Auklet boxes close to the temperature of a natural burrow, but only a few wooden ones are currently in use.  The rest of them are built out of foam, which is really starting to disitengrate, making it difficult to identify which box you’re working at, but also spreading bits of foam all over the island.  To remedy this, we’re working on constructing enough wooden shades to replace all the foam ones.  Last week, Jordan and Meghan cut the wood for 64 new shades, and over the last few days, Hannah and I have nailed them all together and painted them white.  It’s taken up quite a bit of time actually, and hopefully in the next couple of days we’ll get them distributed across the island.

To end with, I thought I’d include a picture of yesterday’s brunch, which was the best one yet, thanks to the abundance of fresh fruit.  On the menu were watermelon, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, nectarines, mango, chocolate chip banana bread, french toast, scrambled eggs, and (for everyone else) bacon.  It’s always nice to have such fresh fruit available, since it doesn’t last for long!

Well, that’s all for now!

Best,

Eleanor