From Pacific to Prairie and Pole to Pole

Well, these last two days, the wind has been back, and with a vengeance.  Today, we’ve been experiencing gusts up to 25-30 knots, and that’s not even as strong as the wind can get here.  If you’ve never been in wind that speed, it’s hard to describe, but it makes everything more difficult.  During particularly strong gusts, you literally have to push yourself to keep walking forward.  The wind and cool weather, however, are bringing benefits for everyone–the upwelling is good for the birds, as I said in my last entry, and the overall change in climate is good for the humans, in that it has reduced our flea problem.  Yes, I have fleas.  We all do.  They hop on you while you’re doing bird work, bite you, and then hang out in your socks for a little while, biting you more.  Unlike birds, the fleas won’t actually live on us, they bail after a pretty short time, but the bites they leave are pretty bad, and very itchy.  So, with my new strategy of wearing rubber boots, combined with the new weather, I’m hoping my legs will have a chance to heal.  So pleasant to contemplate, I know.

Yesterday, as I mentioned, we started our all-day diet watches.  I spent four hours at the Murre Blind yesterday, from six to eight am, and then again from ten to twelve.  Pete and I, during the very early morning watch, were recording fish being brought in almost every minute, but the later watches were much slower.  The majority of fish we saw were juvenile Rockfish, but we also some smelt and a few squid.

Yesterday was also Pigeon Guillemot day, my favorite birds, and I found quite a few hatched chicks in the crevices.

Pigeon Guillemot Chick

Although this chick may seem like he looks a lot like the other bird chicks I’ve posted, he’s much blacker, a pure jet black, and a lot more vocal.  These are feisty chicks, and they usually are born in clutches of two.  The first-born chick will almost always grow much more quickly than the second chick, because the first chick is fed preferentially.

If the second chick can survive this neglect until his older sibling fledges, then he will receive all the feedings, and he will balloon quickly in size and fledge himself.  We’ll see what happens.

Speaking of fledging, the first Cassin’s Auklet Chicks of the year have fledged, meaning that on my daily chick checks, I have found a few empty boxes, two days in a row, so we can officially count the chicks as gone.  Hooray!  Best of luck to them.  I will miss them.

Last night I made dinner, and I think it went over well again.  I made a fettuccine, chard, and fontina torte, and Annie made a chocolate-banana swirl cake that was SO GOOD.  Last night, however, was the first time I noticed that we seem to be starting to run out of fresh produce.  We’re down to some lettuce and carrots in the veggie department, and apples, oranges, and pears as far as fruit.  We’ve also got a few miscellaneous things left, but the people cooking for the next couple of days may have a slightly difficult time.  Hopefully, the weather will allow a resupply boat in on Saturday, but we’ll see.

I may have mentioned once or twice the three trees on the island–they are best known as havens for the lost land birds that get blown off course and are lucky enough to land here (the others end up “face down in the Pacific”).  Today, I saw three birds in the tree next to the Coast Guard House: a European Starling, a Western tanager, and a Rose-breasted Grosbeak.  They were very interesting to watch, and also very beautiful (at least the latter two):

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, from Below

Here is the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, seen from below.  You can just see the bright red patch on the very front of his breast.

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, from the Side

Here is the Grosbeak again, as I could see him from inside the Coast Guard House.  As you can see, the windows in the house are probably in need of a good cleaning.

Western Tanager

Finally, here is a picture of the Western Tanager.  He is very bright and beautiful, and flits around the tree, hardly ever landing on a branch for very long.

For the most part, these birds don’t stick around for very long.  There’s not too much for them to eat, and there are also thousands of hungry gulls, just waiting for them to leave the protection of the tree.  We will see if I spot these guys again.

Weather Station

Finally, here is a picture of our anamometer, which will be of the utmost importance over the next few days, as the weather forecast calls for winds gusting up to 45 knots.  THAT is wind, and I am told the house will shake, and the toilets will flush themselves.  Should be interesting!!  The dial on the right shows windspeed.

Well, that’s all for now.

Best,

Eleanor

I had never been on a boat trip longer than a day before beginning field research aboard the R/V Shearwater, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a full kitchen area and sleeping quarters aboard, as well as tons of deck space for our CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth sensor) and net tow work and a bunch of comfy seats on the flying bridge for bird observations. After loading up the boat with our supplies and instruments, we took a quick dinner break with Jen (who was nice enough to help us get situated on the boat) at “The Brewhouse” which was delicious, then retired to the sleeping quarters for a quick sleep.

Kristen and Augie in a lab area after loading the gear onto the R/V Shearwater

Kristen demonstrates the coziness of our sleeping quarters

The first morning, as with all other mornings on the R/V Shearwater, started bright and early with a quick breakfast and a hot cup of coffee (in a sweet nautical mug).

Augie and his favorite mug

We then put on our bright red work pants and boots and headed out to the deck to begin collecting data. At each station, we would first perform our net tow, then stop to collect CTD data. While the CTD was being lowered to around 100 meters, Kristen and I would often grab a quick snack of trail mix or redvines before returning to the deck to retrieve the device. After the CTD was secured, we would climb up to the flight bridge, where the rest of the Biologists were waiting with binoculars, field guides, and the Husky computer to begin bird observations.

After a day full of net tows and bird observations, we cleaned up our equipment and went into the cabin to cook dinner, look over some of our data, and relax with a game of cribbage before we began an intense night of spotlight netting and banding off the shore of Santa Barbara Island.

Kristen cooking dinner in the kitchen

This would generally last from a little after sundown when the scientists from Santa Barbara Island would come aboard and help us set up a banding station to around midnight, when we had decided we had banded enough birds for the night (mostly Xantus’s Murrelets, but we banded a few Ashy Storm-Petrels and Cassin’s Auklets as well). We caught around 20 birds on a good night, sometimes a few more if we had the time or if the birds were particularly plentiful. At this point in the night, we were completely exhausted, and quickly retired to our bunks so we could get as much sleep as possible before starting again the next day.

Life on land is not nearly as fun as life onboard the R/V Shearwater!

Bridge View! Kristen and Augie prepare to cast the CTD into the ocean on one of our many stations. Dani readies the winch.

As you all know, we have not been on a boat for a month. In fact, despite all these lovely blog entries about the high-seas and the creatures that live there, we’ve been in lab for several weeks working with data and creating colorful graphs and figures! Here is a sample of just one of the many graphs and maps Augie and I have made.

Temperature and ocean depth. This is a vertical slice of one of our transects. The white block is missing data do to a shallow cast.

This is a vertical section of ocean around SBI, and shows the changing temperature with depth. You can see the rapidly changing temperature around 15-20m. This is called the thermocline, and it is often the home to many marine primary and secondary producers. Our CTD recorded not only temperature, but also salinity, which changes with depth and temperature, fluorescence, which is a proxy for the amount of phytoplankton in the water, and water density. And we had 7 transects around the island! In short, we have a lot of graphs.
In order to get the data from the CTD into these readable figures, we had to download the data, decode it so our computers could read it, format it so we could then run it through another program especially designed for CTDs, and

Kristen and Dani attempted to download data from our CTD onto our awesome, waterproof labtop.

then fiddle with the code so it matched our unique data. It was more complicated that it sounds.
We also have made several maps that are horizontal slices of the ocean at, say, 10meters all around the island. These are cool, because then we can lay our bird-densities over them and see what sort of environmental factors XAMU prefer. We’ll be able to do the same with the krill, once we have a better idea of what is in our samples.

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday!  Two nights in a row of night work have left me exhausted.  Plus, tomorrow, I’ve got to do a diet watch from 6am to 8am, so I’ll be up early.  But, on the bright side, I get to shower tomorrow!  It’s also my cooking day, so I’ll have a lightened load of afternoon work, and no evening work.  Maybe even time for a nap!

The past two nights of night work have been a lot of fun.  Two nights ago, as I mentioned at the end of my last entry, we went up on Lighthouse Hill to mistnet storm petrels.  Of course, we caught birds other than storm petrels (Cassin’s auklets, and the occasional gull), but those we just let go right away.  For the most part, we were catching two different types of storm petrels, and they are very interesting birds.  Ashy Storm Petrels (of which we caught 48, considered a slow night) forage for food way out on the edge of the continental shelf, about six miles from here.  Leach’s Storm Petrels (of which we caught four, and which are usually much rarer) forage even further out, possibly a hundred miles from the island.

An Adult Ashy Storm Petrel, in my hand

Considering their size, which you can see in the picture at left, relative to my hand, this is quite a distance for these birds to travel.  To attract them to our net, we play a call, quite loud, on a stereo we place behind the net.  Then, we simply sit by the net and wait for the birds to fly into it.  For most of the night, the sky was clear, and despite the light pollution from San Francisco, the stars were incredible.  Darker conditions would have been better for catching birds, but obviously not as good for star-gazing.

In the picture at left, you can see a couple of things.  First of all, everything is tinted red, because we use head lamps with a red filter to minimize disturbance to the wildlife.  Second, you can see the small protruberance on the top of the bird’s nose–hence the name Tubenose.  This “horn” helps the birds to drink saltwater, and excrete the salt efficiently.

Storm petrel netting didn’t end until around 2am, and the next day, it was up at 8:30 to monitor murre plots.  In addition, Gerry, Annie, Russ, and Pete took the boat up to the North Farallon islands to conduct the first ever boat survey of bird life up there.  The water was extremely calm, and the ride there took only about 25 minutes.  The afternoon yesterday found us doing another massive chick check, this time including the Rhinocerous Auklet boxes, another tubenose, but with a larger horn on their beak, as you may have guessed from the name.

Rhino Auklet Chick

Rhino Auklet chicks are very cute.  Similar-looking to Cassin’s Auklet chicks, but slightly darker.  And, if you look closely (although this isn’t a very good picture for doing so) you can see the beginnings of a tube nose.  Very cute.

Rhinocerous Auklets live in burrows, naturally, and the boxes that we build for them, but they also inhabit the caves on the island.

Entrance to Rabbit Cave

The picture below is the entrance to one of the main caves on the island, known as Rabbit Cave.  Although the entrance is pretty small (those are Russ’ arms), after crawling about fifty feet, the cavern opens up into a quite large compartment, probably about fifty feet high and maybe thirty across.  It’s one of the only places on the island where you can find absolute quiet, a gull-free zone.  I spent a little while in there yesterday, checking on Auklets, looking around, and having Russ tell me ghost stories, relating to the Aleut woman whose skeleton was found in the back of the cave back when the lighthouse keepers first explored it.

Cave Inscription

Though there aren’t any major cave formations in it, it is a very still environment, and things last a very long time in it.  In addition, since being taken over by PRBO, there has been a concerted effort to take care of the cave, which was long ago a sea cave, and keep it pristine.

At right is a picture of a cave inscription, which reads “Sewart, ’06.”  That is not referring to 2006.  This was written in 1906, by some of the very early settlers to visit the island.  Pretty cool stuff!

Last night, I baked a chocolate chip cookie pie.  (I baked it as good luck for Claudia, who had a job interview today.  She’s trying to get a job on an island WAY off of South Georgia, studying Albatross.  The job would be for 2 and a half YEARS, and she would get resupplied only twice a year, by boat.  Intense.)  There is none left now, and I think it was a big hit.  After eating pie, Russ, Pete, Annie, Gerry, and I went out to deploy Time-Depth Recorders on ten Cassin’s Auklets.  The TDR’s are for the study that Nina Karnovsky set up here last year, and I will be taking all of the data collected by them back to the lab at Pomona and analyzing it for the next year.

TDR Bird

We were out from around 10:30 to midnight last night gluing the TDR’s onto adult Cassin’s Auklets.  The deployment had to occur late at night, because the adults only return to feed their chicks at night.  In addition, we had to search through quite a few boxes to find birds with fairly young (downy) chicks, because we wanted to choose birds whose chicks would not fledge while the TDR’s are deployed (because then the adults would stop returning to the box at night, and we would never be able to retrieve the TDR).

The deployment process actually went very smoothly, with each of us having a different job to get the process done quickly, and with the handling time for the bird starting at around 6 minutes and being slowly whittled down to a low of 3 minutes 59 seconds (I can’t even count the number of times that Russ said last night, “We are a well-oiled MACHINE!”).

I was up again pretty early this morning to do Pigeon Guillemot Resighting, and I just back from my chick check.  Soon, I’ll be going out to do the Pigeon Guillemot Breeding study, the one that has me scaling cliff walls to peak inside nest crevices.  No night work tonight, though, so I plan to go to bed right after dinner.

To end, I’ll talk about what I’ve seen lately.  First of all, I spotted a Northern Mockingbird in the tree next to the house today (there are three trees on the island, and we check them frequently for lost land birds).  Second, I’ve seen at least a few dead pinnipeds (seals, sea lions) floating around the island in the last two days.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the fishery opening a few days ago.  Can’t be sure.  Third, I’ve been seeing the same small humpback whale, every single evening, from the blind at Sea Lion Cove.

Humpback Whale

Often, I only see his back right after I see his spray, but sometimes, he shows me his tail, or sticks his fins out of the water.  The whales around here are a lot of fun to watch, and if you look hard enough you can almost always see one.

In the background of this photo, you can see the North Farallon islands.  No people live on them, but they are home to a lot of birds and pinnipeds, just like this island.

Though we’ve experiencing fabulous weather since I got here, that all changed today, luckily.  The wind, clouds, and cold weather are back, with gusts today around 20 knots.  The wind is really important here, since it drives a process known as upwelling.  The Farallon Islands are located very close to the continental shelf, and high winds here push warmer surface water away from the continental shelf.  When the surface water is pushed away, it is replaced by cooler, nutrient-rich water from the depths, and it is that water which drives all of the productivity around here, from the base of the food chain all the way up to the whales and seabirds.  So, to have a healthy chick-fleding year, we need this wind!  The seas were even high enough today that we cancelled a media boat that was supposed to come out here.  They will probably come out later this week.

Well, that’s all for now!

Best,

Eleanor

While we were processing data in our lab, both Augie and I were study subjects for Sadie Barr (’09), who is working on a independent project on metabolism, funded by a HHMI grant. Here’s a shout-out to her (because she visits us in our lab a lot. She gets lonely in the basement, I think)
She’s looking at how much energy is spent in the digestion of processed verses whole foods. One day, Augie and I both ate two delcious grilled cheese sandwiches on whole bread with sharp cheddar. We ate this meal at 10am, and didn’t eat again until 4! The next day, the meal of the day was kraft singles on WONDERBREAD! Not Delicious! To make sure we had the same number of calories, this sandwich was a double-decker. Each day, Sadie did hourly measurements of our oxygen consumption rate. It was hard to survive 6 HOURS without eating =) Augie almost cheated, because the 2nd day was Free Donut Day at Krispy Kreme.
Good luck to Sadie!

Sadie and Augie show off the food that we snack on all day long. But we couldn't snack while Sadie was measuring our metabolism. Alas!

Sorry for the lack of posts from the Channel Island crew! Augie and I went on a whirlwind tour of the Bay Area last week, and were too busy to keep up on our blogging. But here’s a recap!

The Lagemann boys! (minus Alex, plus Kristen) From left: Peter, Augie, Gian, and Kristen. Thanks to the Lagemanns for letting me stay at their gorgeous home!

Last Tuesday Augie and I loaded into our trusty suburban (with significantly less gear than last time) to go to PRBO Conservation Science in Petaluma, where we would learn techniques of identifying the krill in our net tow samples! It was a long drive, but the radio kept us entertained. We stayed the night at Augie’s house in Saratoga, CA- his parents were very nice and generous and made us a delicious dinner. I also got to meet all three of Augie’s brothers- even Alex, who goes to Berkeley, came home for a surprise visit.

I was super excited about crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It was nothing exciting for my Bay-Area-Bred lab partner.

The next day, we woke up early to beat the traffic on the way through San Francisco to the PRBO headquarters in Petaluma. There we met Meredith Elliot, who was also very sweet and lent us all her equipment and lab space for two whole days. She also (very patiently) explained all her techniques for identifying net tow samples. She mostly works with Tucker Trawls, with which you can get a more exact depth than our hoops nets. Also, in Northern California, they get a lot more krill and a lot fewer copepods in their samples. So, we focused on our krill, though they were all zoea (larval), so they were very tiny. Adult krill often migrate diurnally, meaning during the day they sink to deeper waters and they ride the currents up to the surface at night, so our samples probably just weren’t deep enough to collect adults. We’ll try to put up some pictures of our samples later…

Augie brings our samples and identification guides into PRBO. Hooray for being out of the car!

Not only can the hulk knock over buildings, he also helped us keep track of how many times we split our sample.

In order to get a manageable number of krill to identify, we use a plankton splitter, which is this simple, but rather ingenious piece of equipment that cuts every sample in half, and then half again, and then half again, etc., etc. On our samples, we often did seven splits- so our final sample was 2^7 or 128 times smaller than the original! We split until we had approximately 100 krill to ID. From there, it was a lot of microscope work- lots of staring at tiny carapaces and denticles (little hooks on the carapace) and telsons (part of the tail).We had three main species—Euphausia pacifica, Nematoscelis difficilis and Thysanoessa spinifera. At first, I was sure I would never ever be able to tell them apart. But, thanks to Meredith and her list of minute differences, I think I can ID them pretty well. Not only do we have krill and copepods in our samples, but also decapods, which grow up to be crabs, lobsters, etc., and mysids, which are shrimp-like and easily confused with krill. phew!

Augie funnels our krill into the plankton splitter.

Kristen separates the krill from the rest of the sample before counting and IDing the different krill species.

Augie and I explored Petaluma that night. We also explored the “strange, new worlds” alongside Kirk and Spock as we watched the new Star Trek movie. It was great! (this was after I threw my movie ticket into the Petaluma River. Ooops!)

Fun Fact of the Day: Petaluma is the former home of the World Arm-Wrestling Championships! Fortunately, the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest still calls Petaluma home.
Thanks again to Meredith, who helped us out SO MUCH, and all of the PRBO staff (especially for the pizza and oreos!)

Last Friday, John, Nina, and I did our very first banding run at the Canyon Creek MAPS site. Just as a rehash, a MAPS station is a bird-banding station where you catch wild birds in mist nets and look at their physical traits to help assess survivorship and productivity of avian populations. John and Sabrina McNew (Pomona ’09) set up the Canyon Creek site back in 2007.

We got there shortly before sunrise, but the fascinating thing is that this far north, even before the sun is up, the sky is already light. So we opened our nets with chilled fingers (or maybe only my fingers were cold), and kept them open for six hours (as per MAPS protocol). The weather gradually transitioned from cold to hot (50F to 80+ F: Valley County is a cold desert ecosystem), and as it got warmer the bugs (mosquitoes, horse flies, deer flies, no see ums) became more vicious.

This is our study site at dawn (yes, I woke up that early, and yes, it's already light out this far north before the sun rises)

Nina and John holding a yellow warbler

Bugsuit party!

It was a very productive day! In the course of those 6 hours, we caught 16 birds, two of which we recaptured, for a total sample size of 18! We caught brown-headed cowbirds (both female), spotted towhees, yellow warblers (both male, with vivid yellow coloring with saffron streaks), house wrens, field sparrows, and a fledgling Western Meadowlark. An interesting fact is that although summer is breeding season for many of these birds (including the cowbirds), the cowbird females did not have a brood patch. A brood patch is basically a very wrinkly, very veiny patch of skin in the lower belly above the cloaca. Its purpose is to keep an egg warm enough to hatch as the mother sits on it. Brown-headed cowbirds don’t develop brood patches because they are parasites, and one of the females was captured twice from the same net (net 1, which looked pretty darn invisible for a good long time), and that was the site where we also captured the field sparrows. Looks like there might be a cowbird chick poking its head up in a field sparrow nest one of these days!

Invisible Net 1. You can't see the mist net in this light!

I was so inspired by the banding run that I decided to continue working on my yard list (list of birds in my “yard”, which I’ve liberally taken to mean the whole trailer park and the grassy neighborhood park behind my trailer). A few young girls saw me wearing my binoculars, looking somewhat crazy, and called me over to help them out. Turns out that they had mistakenly buried a fledgling Common Grackle (looks like a crow) that they thought was dead. I’ve been attempting a very jury-rigged rehab since then, and the little guy is quite tenacious. The girls have decided it’s a female and named it Buttercup, and hopefully Buttercup will pull through! Unfortunately, the grackle has a badly broken right leg (its foot isn’t fully attached).

Moral of this story is to please, please call a qualified wildlife rehabilitation expert if you ever come across an injured animal. They can be dangerous, and more to the point, you can injure them severly if they’re handled improperly (much like how you’re not supposed to move a person who’s broken a bone before calling 911). Most areas have wildlife rehabilitation centers, or emergency vet clinics. And in a pinch, a call to 411 or a quick check online can provide very insightful advice.

The last two days have been pretty much super busy here.  Lots of stuff going on, all over the place.  Yesterday, we started our murre diet watches, which begin every year when a certain number of chicks have hatched underneath the Murre Blind, the third major bird blind on the island.  The Murre Blind is aptly named, since, as you can see below, it looks out on a LOT of murres:

View from the Murre Blind

Diet watches happen every day, from now until there are only about ten chicks left in the plot.  For the most part, they happen for two hours a day, a different two hours each day.  About once a week, however, we will conduct an all-day diet watch which lasts from six in the morning until eight in the evening, during which everyone on the island will spend about four hours in the blind.

For now, however, it’s just two hours a day, and we’re rotating.  Because of my schedule, I ended up pulling diet watch duty both yesterday and today, from 9 to 11 yesterday, and from 11 to 1 today.

To conduct a diet watch, we simply point our binoculars at the point in the plot we are monitoring, and wait for an adult murre to bring a fish back to its chick.  We then have a few seconds to identify what kind of fish it is, which individual bird brought it back, and how big the fish is.  Then, the chicks scarf it down.  Here is a murre with a fish, probably an anchovy, although since I can’t see the dorsal fin, it’s hard to tell:

Murre With Fish

I took this particular picture from Sea Lion Cove, where I am much closer to the birds than at the Murre Blind, so I’m also not usually that close to the fish.

For the most part, the fish are not too hard to identify.  So far, I’ve seen a lot of juvenile rockfish, some anchovies, a few smelt, and even a couple of squid.  For now, though, the feeding is kind of slow, since more chicks still need to hatch.

Yesterday was also the day that Gerry McChesney and a two-person film crew arrived on the island to film an episode of a PBS show called “California Gold.”  Although I am not famous now, they DID film me checking a Cassin’s Auklet box during my daily chick check, and they put a lot of focus on how I was wearing a hard hat.  Perhaps it will be my fifteen seconds of fame.  The episode is scheduled to air soon, but I’m not sure exactly when.

The other thing that has been happening for the last two days is that I have been doing the daily chick checks on my own.  Usually Jordan comes with me, but she has had other things to do in the early afternoon, so I’ve had to go by myself.  This means it takes me a couple of hours to get through all the chicks, since more and more of them are being added to my check list.  In addition, the gulls are getting more and more aggressive, and so when I’m out on my own doing the checks, I frequently get harrassed, pecked at, bonked in the head, etc.  I’m actually getting used to it now, but it can be a kind of stressful experience.

Finally, Rockfish fishing season opened out here yesterday.  With salmon season on hold for the past two years, Rockfish season is now one of the only major fisheries out here, and to “celebrate” the occasion, boats POURED out to the Farallones yesterday, and continued today.  Overall, we spotted more than fifty small personal craft and eight commercial sport-fishing boats in the vicinity of the island.  Compare this to the three whale-watching vessels I’ve seen in the last eight days combined, and it’s kind of disorienting.  It does provide some amusement though to people-watch from the blinds, though often it’s just to watch people who appear very seasick. The other thing we have to watch out for on these conditions are violations of the rules.  There are very strict regulations about how close boats/planes can be to the islands, and any disturbing of wildlife is taken very seriously.  In the last two days, there have been violations by both planes AND boats, but it’s often hard to take down all the necessary information (to send to the Coast Guard) before the boat/plane has disappeared.

Tonight, because the winds are very calm and the moon will be rising very late, we are going to go out and mistnet storm petrels.  That means we are going to put up a huge mistnet (ours is ten meters long) on lighthouse hill, sit in the dark, and collect the ashy storm petrels that run into the net.  This usually concludes around 2 am, so it will have been a very long day by the time that is done.  In order to prepare, I spent the last two hours helping to repair a mistnet that had some holes in it.  For anyone who has ever mist-netted before, you can understand what a frustrating process this was.  Mistnets are made out of a very fine thread, and they consist of yards and yards of fabric, essentially shaped in little slings, so that when a bird runs into the net, it falls straight down into the waiting “hammock.”  I hope my repairs will hold, but I’m completely new at that process, so we will see.

Well, I need to go and do my re-sights at Sea Lion Cove.  Since I’ve been spending so much time there, I thought I would throw in a picture of what it looks like in there–not too exciting actually, but very functional.

Me in the Sea Lion Cove Blind

Finally, I will end today’s entry with an exciting piece of news, and a funny picture.  First, the exciting news is that we have decided that a breeding pair of Peregreine Falcons is living on the island, since two adults (who stay very close together, unusual behavior if not breeding) and a young bird have been spotted on the island for the past few weeks.  This is unusual, since the Farallones are not typically a breeding ground for these birds.

And finally, my funny picture (or at least I thought it was funny):

Two Gull Chicks

This picture is of two gull chicks I spotted today.  The one on the right (the kind of gross-looking one that blends in with the nest) is literally minutes old, having just emerged from the shell.  They’re not as cute when they’re still wet.

His sibling is wearing his egg shell as a hat.

Very cute!

Alright, that’s all for now.

Best,

Eleanor

So, first, a quick clarification.  There are two houses on the island–they are identical, and were designed as duplexes (each for two families) back when the lighthouse keepers and their families still lived on the island.  One, the one all the biologists and interns live in, is called the PRBO House.  The other is called the Coast Guard House, but no one lives in it for now.  We call it that because it is their property.  When coast guard people come out here to do work, that is where they stay.  When they’re not here, it serves as our exercise/shower/tv headquarters, and our overflow house.  So, on the rare occasion that we have guests, they stay there.

For example, tomorrow!  Tomorrow, Gerry McChesney, the Farallones Refuge manager, will be coming out here and staying for a week.  In tow, he wil be bringing the first of two film crews that are going to be visiting the island over the course of the next week.  Both are crews from PBS, and they are each filming documentaries.  One will be a documentary called “California Gold,” so I assume it’s about the Gold Rush.  The Farallones, during the gold rush, provided a source of eggs for the miners, before chickens were brought to California.  The other documentary is some sort of nature thing, presumably about birds.

Tomorrow, according to Pete, I will probably be taking the film crew around on my daily chick checks, so stay tuned for me to become super famous.  Potentially.

So anyway!  About today!  Today was epic.  Started out with my standard corm re-sights, and then lunch.  Without many cormorants to monitor, I spent a lot of time watching one of the murres, whose chick has hatched:

Common Murre With Chick

I think he is very cute, and the parents don’t let him out very often, so glimpses of him are rare.

After lunch is when things got crazy.  Today was the day for a fifteen-day chick check that occurs as part of the Known Age/ Old Age Cassin’s auklet Study.  This study focuses (as you may have guessed from the title) only on birds that have been banded here in the past, so that we know how old they are, and follows their chicks and reproductive success.  That study happened to correspond with a different study, during which we visit all of the Auklet Boxes, no matter whether the parents’ age is known or not, and band the chicks, so that those birds will, in the future, become known age birds.  This meant there were 402 Cassin’s Auklet Boxes to check for chicks.  The majority of these chicks had to be weighed, and 128 of them had to be banded.  That is a LOT of work!  Banding birds can be a relatively slow process, since we try very hard to make sure the bands won’t come off, and won’t catch on anything during the bird’s lifetime.  It took three and a half hours this afternoon, which is a long time to be kneeling on the ground in front of auklet boxes.

Following the auklet study, Claudia took me around to her Western Gull (WEGU) plot, which I will be taking over when she leaves in two weeks.  It seems like a very complicated, relatively frustrating study, but hopefully I will get the hang of it.  After that, more corm resights, and then a delicious dinner cooked by Russ.

After dinner tonight was my first night work here on the island, and today, we were collecting diet samples from Cassin’s Auklets, or, to put it more directly, barfing them.  Barfing Cassin’s Auklets is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  The adult birds return to the island at night, with little pouches under their necks full of chewed up food to feed to their chicks.  To catch the birds, we sit in the dark, waiting to hear the thud of the bird as it lands on the ground (two of them actually ran right into my face though, so maybe they don’t have much better night vision than we do).  When one hears the “thud,” you switch on your headlamp quickly and lunge at the bird.  Five times out of six, you miss, because they’re very fast and small.  However, occasionally, you don’t miss, and you grab the bird.  Almost immediately, the bird begins to vomit, so you have a VERY short window during which to shove its head into a plastic sample bag.  Then, you have to massage its throat, to make sure you get all the food out.  Pretty nasty, and it smells a lot like fish.

After we got our samples, we took them back to the diet lab.  Here’s with  me with the ones I collected!  Yum yum:

Me with Diet Samples, in our Banding Lab (Pete and Annie in the background)

The samples are mainly composed of krill and fish bits, but a cursory glance revealed some barnacle larvae as well.  My hands, despite having been washed, do smell pretty bad now, but that will probably go away soon.

All of the samples we collect are placed in bags, and the bags are labelled carefully and placed in the freezer.  At the end of the season, we will mail them to an expert, who will spend a long time picking through these diet samples, and figuring out just what is in them.

Overall, a fun and exciting night!

As far as unusual bird sightings, I spotted a Heerman’s gull today.  Not all that uncommon, but certainly more common south of where we are right now.  Molly, the Brant Goose, is still limping around, defying the odds.  Also, two common ravens have taken to harrassing some of our murres, and I hope they go away.

Well, I’m off to bed.  Up early tomorrow to start a new study, diet watches (more on that later)!

Best,

Eleanor

So I didn’t get a chance to write yesterday because it was a very busy day for me–it was my day to cook dinner.  Around here, dinner is really important.  Whoever’s turn it is gets a free pass on their evening work, so that they can work on a delicious feast.  So I still had all of my morning responsibilities, but then in the early afternoon, we went out to weigh auklet chicks for a certain study.  This involved a lot of banding, since many of the cassin’s auklet chicks are getting big enough to band, and so it took a long time.  After that, I started dinner!  I made lemon bars, spinach enchiladas (of Grey family fame!!), and calabacitas (a sort of squash/zucchini medley with cheese, corn, and chiles).  I think it was a big hit, because there were no leftovers.  But cooking for six people here is like cooking for ten anywhere else–working in the field all day makes you very very hungry.

After dinner, we went over to the Coast Guard house to watch a movie, and we picked “Young Frankenstein,” the Mel Brooks movie.  They have quite a collection of movies over there, but Pete says he’s seen them all at least twice.  Russ, however, had not seen Young Frankenstein, and so it was a natural pick.  Since we eat dinner so late (around 8:30), we didn’t get back from the movie until around midnight, and everyone went to sleep right away.

Today was great.  I performed my regular cormorant re-sights and all that, but I have also taken on a new species.  Yesterday, and moreso today, I started working with the Pigeon Guillemot, and I think I have a new favorite bird.  Perhaps, however, I will just avoid having favorite birds.  However, just check this bird out!  Does it get any better than the bright red mouth and feet??

Adult Pigeon Guillemot

Turns out, however, that it DOES get even better.  Yesterday, I was simply watching these birds through my binoculars, trying to re-spot banded birds.

Today, however, I started work on a breeding study involving the PIGU’s (everything here has a four-letter abbreviation.  Everything).  For the breeding study, I have to literally scale cliffs (these birds nest in high, hard-to-reach crevices), check for eggs, check for chicks, etc.  If there are chicks, I weigh them, and band them, etc.

So, aside from being really cool looking, they have the cutest chicks ever, hands down.  I know I’ve said that before, but these really take the cake.  I found three chicks today–they are covered in jet black down, and they are very small, only about forty grams. If there are two chicks, we spray paint patches on their sides to tell them apart.  There are starting to be a lot of chicks running around with pink or orange rumps.  I didn’t take my camera today, because I am still getting used to scrambling around on the rocks, but next time I will.

Scaling the rocks to find the PIGU’s, I actually got super warm today.  It was sunny here all day, with almost fifty miles of visibility.  Incredible.  Aside from my PIGU work today, I also had to do my elephant seal resight.  On the way out the door to do that, Russ pointed out two humpback whales, which had come into the bay and were breaching, repeatedly, and playing around.  It was incredible–we watched them for almost half an hour through our binoculars, leaping almost all the way out of the water, and creating colossal splashes.  Unfortunately, they were too far away to take pictures.

The elephant seals today were as large and smelly as ever.  However, at one of my sites, I found a tiny harbor seal mixed in with them–he looked lost, but very cute:

Elephant Seals and Harbor Seal

I bet you can figure out for yourself which one is which, but it was super funny to see the little harbor seal, lying next to those enormous, smelly, belchy animals.  I wonder if he’ll stick around.

One final piece of news!  The hardhat-wearing has officially started.  I got bonked in the head today pretty hard, and was therefore really glad that I had decided to wear my hardhat.

Me in My Hardhat (and check out what a BEAUTIFUL day it is)

There are many different personalities when it comes to gulls.  Many of them will simply swoop at you, “decorating” you with guano as they pass.  Some of them go for a different approach, scraping their feet against your head, and making a very distinct sound.  Often, feet-scraping will escalate to head bonking, using their fairly substantial beaks.

The really mean gulls, however, go straight to the head bonking, and although they don’t cause serious damage, it can be painful if you’re not wearing the appropriate protective gear.

Well, time for me to go do my evening cormorant sightings.  There is also a new murre chick living right under the blind that I am excited to see–hopefully I will get some pictures.

Best,

Eleanor