Crouching in Bushes Pays Off, Eventually

I was feeling antsy and unproductive yesterday afternoon, for, with Dave gone, nest-checks done and any attempt at analyzing playback videos only leading to serious procrastination on tumblr, I wasn't really getting anything done. It was a nice, breezy, cloudy day and so, after my umpteenth tumblr dashboard refresh, I snapped the lid of my laptop shut, grabbed my camera and set off to stake out the Spotted Sandpiper nest.

I hid myself in a convenient bush of stinging nettle across the trail from Yellow Flower Nest. The sandpiper flushed off when I got there, of course, but I was prepared to wait for it to come back, however long it would take.

It took a while.

I crouched in the nettles for over an hour, getting stung to no end by fire ants and, quite hilariously, not being noticed by the five people that walked by, two of them actually stopping to have a conversation right in front of Yellow Flower Nest. I was tempted to jump out at them, binoculars and camera at the ready, yelling “sandpiper!” and gesticulating wildly. Needless to say, I controlled the urge.

However, just as my attention was starting to wander and I was looking up trying to spot a gull that had just wooooshed by, I heard a soft weet. And there it was, not more than two meters away from me, a cautious little Spotted Sandpiper, fidgeting, looking around and running up and down the trail on its surprisingly fast, spindly little legs.

Spotted Sandpiper, checking out its surroundings

Presenting, Spotted Sandpier from Yellow Flower Nest

Eventually it hopped onto the rock and started preening, trying to look as nonchalant as possible but avoiding even looking its nest. I fired away.

Fluffing out its feathers, trying to appear nonchalant

After much cautious weeting, and after cleaning each flight feather at least twenty times, the little shorebird hopped down onto its nest... and disappeared from sight.

I had stupidly chosen the worst vantage point possible for Yellow Flower's shrubbery was completely blocking my view of the nest. I tried to move as silently as I could, but the sandpiper was having none of it and flushed in an instant. Oh well. Better luck next time, I suppose.

Today, it was the Eastern Kingbird nest's turn to be stalked. Who would have known that they would prove even harder to stalk than the fidgety sandpiper. I crouched in a, thankfully stinging nettle-less, bush for over three hours as the sun set around me, watching the pair of kingbirds fly back and forth between two trees, calling, preening, fly-catching, and, best of all mobbing an adult Herring Gull, but never venturing close to their nest.

The pair of Eastern Kingbirds. An overexposed shot that turned out artsy!

The pair.

Eastern Kingbird with moth

Eastern Kingbird, preening

The female was being such a tease! The nest was on a tree that was right in the middle of her flight path between the two other trees, and every time she swooped by my heart would leap into my mouth for it would look like she was going to land on the nest.

The female, taking off yet again

The bursts of adrenaline, and associated sightings of Grey Catbirds, Carolina Wrens and Herring Gulls getting mobbed, kept me rooted to my spot, despite the steady loss of feeling in my legs. 

Catbird!

I managed to trace the entire process of my dessert being digested before the female finally decided to pay a brief visit to her nest, allowing me to snap a grainy picture, before flying off again, landing on a nearby perch and sitting there looking pretty in the light of the setting sun.

The female on the nest!

Lookin' pretty

Ah, the setting sun. When it finally got too dark to get a good picture of the nest, regardless of whether the bird decided to return to it or not, I made my way back to Kiggins and, emerging from the bushy walls of the Turbine Trail, I was treated to the most marvellous sunset I have ever seen. The sky was on fire; broad, colourful streaks of the most magnificent fire, stretching across the entire swath of sky like a rich tapestry. Nothing, nothing, compares to an Appledore sunset.   

All of the Bird Babies

Today was officially Bird Nests / Adorable Bird Babies / Bird Reproductive Effort day. Well, it actually started yesterday while we were doing data-entry. During a pause in the entering of data, Dave casually remarked, “Oh, I found the Spotted Sandpiper nest today!”

By the Spotted Sandpiper nest he meant the nest I had been looking for for weeks now. Every time I would walk up the trail to the dock, to go check nests at Pepperell Cove, a sandpiper would flush out from this one big rock on the side of the trail, and I would always notice it a split second too late to pinpoint the location of its nest.

One day, out of sheer frustration, I even climbed up onto the rock and braved a full-fledged Great Black-backed attack to comb what I thought was every inch of the rock for the nest, all to no avail. And here was Dave telling me that all one had to do to see the nest is walk up to the rock and look down.

“Are you serious?” I asked him. “OK, I'll go find this nest tomorrow.”

Tomorrow rolled around and I spent literally fifteen minutes, pacing the length of the rock, inspecting every single indentation really, really closely and not spotting anything. Just then the Seal Interns happened to walk by.

“Are you looking for the sandpiper nest?” Christine asked as she and Lauren walked up the path towards me.

“Yes, and I can't find it! Apparently only Dave can see it!” I cried, throwing my hands up in frustration and looking down.

And there it was. Nestled cosily behind a yellow flower and under some leaves. Four neat little eggs. The evocation of Dave's name was the needed magical touch, I suppose.

Discovery of the Spotted Sandpiper nest

Similarly, while walking back from a low-tide survey for banded gulls yesterday evening, Dave remarked, without breaking stride, that he'd found an Eastern Kingbird nest.

“What, where?! Wait, the Turbine Trail? No way! I see those birds every day!”

Yep, I do. And everyday I miss their glaringly obvious nest staring down at me from a tree branch that literally juts out onto the trail, almost as it were begging me to notice it. And, somehow, I had managed to ignore it for days. 

But now that I know where it is, my mission is to produce photographic evidence of its existence, with one of the parents on it. The same goes for the sandpiper nest. Today I spent a half-hour crouching in the bushes in front of the nest with a camera as the sandpiper stood about ten meters away, bobbing his tail nervously and refusing to return to its eggs. Ah well, I am going to keep a close watch on that yellow flower now.

The next bird on the nest/egg and chick/reproduction list is the Barn Swallow. Today we set up RFID gear on three Barn Swallow nests – nests NN, 300 and 206 – to continue Brendan's project of monitoring nest-visits by PIT-tagged swallows. I got a crash-course in the working of batteries, circuit-boards and antennas, and the importance of duct tape in holding all of the above up on the rafters around a swallow nest.

All three nests had chicks. Barn Swallow chicks are altricial – when they hatch they are blind, tiny, have almost no down and can barely thermoregulate their alien-like bodies. All they do, for the next two weeks or so, is sit in their cup-like nest and open their gaping yellow mouth wide as their parents shove food into it. Not a bad childhood, if you ask me. And they are cute in their own, – admittedly, non-gull-chick-like – way.

A Barn Swallow chick

I went back in the afternoon to check that the parents were OK with the RFID antennas around their nests, and hadn't abandoned their nests. Crouching in the cool underside of P-K lab, on a sketchy but mud-free blanket, I got some nice shots of one of the NN parents feeding its offspring. Looking forward to some good data from that nest tomorrow!

A Barn Swallow chick, poking its head out over the RFID antenna encircling its nest

Barn Swallow mealtime!

Parent on nest NN

Along with swallow nests under Dorm 3, there's also a Carolina Wren nest that we discovered a few days ago. I went to photograph it today. However, as I walked up to it, nothing happened, no parents flushed off, no calls emanated from within. Assuming the parents were off foraging, I reached a hand in to check for the eggs. 

Bad idea.

The incubating bird shot out like a angry bee, incidentally pushing one of its eggs out in the process. I backed off immediately but its loud, angry chatter followed me all the way down to the Commons. Lesson number one and only: BE ULTRA CAREFUL, ALWAYS.

The Carolina Wren nest

A ticked off Carolina Wren 

Ticked off Carolina Wren part 2

And we were, in the case of the next nest: the Black Guillemot nest. Kayla and I ensured that we approached the nest very slowly, saw the guillemot fly off, and spent no more than five minutes gushing over the cuteness of the chicks. They were still two balls of black fluff, but oh so much sassier! As I reached my hand under the rock for them, one of the chicks, that tiny little barely 70 grams of fluff, actually lunged at my fingers and tried to bite it off! Not that it met with much success. But it didn't give up and kept hissing, showing off its splendid red gape, as Kayla held it in her hand. 

I am cute and I know it: Black Guillemot chick

All of the sass

Red gape

So much smarter than gull chicks who just poop and run away, almost always in the direction of a Black-backed nest. I must admit, I am quite enamored of Black Guillemots and may or may not have spent many hours researching them, and people who study them, stumbling upon this excellent article about George Divoky's research, in the process.

And, last but not the least, dumb but no less adorable and amazing Herring Gull chicks. A nest under the porch of Kiggins hatched recently and yesterday I spent an hour recording the chicks peeping, feeding, tripping over each other and snoozing. Here's a sampling of some raw footage (caution: loud gulls in the background) -

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I was going through my photographs from yesterday and happened upon one of this Yellow Warbler hatchling that I'd completely forgotten I'd seen yesterday at P-K lab. It was hopping around in the bushes, following its mom around and begging furiously for food.

Yellow Warbler fledgling

Chicks, (the Lack of) Swallows, Contrails and more Chicks!

Apparently gulls don't have Sundays. Who knew. Of course, I had anticipated such a thing but, being a tad lazy, and with Dave being miles away, I started nest checks at a leisurely 8 AM. 10 AM, Sunday brunch time, rolled around and I was still out on the rocky coast with three more chicks to bleed and measure before I would be done... with barely half of my nest checks. I dashed off a frantic text to Kayla and Brendan asking them to save me a pancake or two – for food disappears quickly on Appledore – processed the three adorable little day-old fuzzballs, earning a few nicks on my helmet in the process and a half hour later was finally back in the RIFS lab with eight new blood samples rattling away happily in my makeshift tackle box blood-kit.

After brunch, it was more nest checks and even adding a few late nests to the list, racking up the total number of nests I monitor to 59. Let me tell you, running over precarious rocks with a little ball of Herring Gull fluff clutched to your chest as an angry parent slams repeatedly into your helmet is definitely the greatest adrenalin rush, ever. It was a beautiful, sunny day and after taking twenty or so particularly hard hits from one of the gulls at nest 12 H 283, it was time for a break. I just lay down on a nice, flat rock on Pebble Beach and soaked up the warm sun, the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks and the gulls mewing to their chicks almost lulling me to sleep. It is quickly becoming my favourite rock on the island.

The rest of the afternoon was spent trying to catch Barn Swallows under Palmer-Kinne (P-K) Lab for Brendan's independent project. His research this summer involves putting PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) tags on the swallows and antennas around their cup-shaped mud nests to record the amount of time each parent spends at the nest, feeding the chicks and such. Basically, every time a PIT tagged swallow lands on a rigged nest, the antenna records the individual's PIT tag number and thus enables us to track each individual bird's activity around the nest. But, to be able to do this, the swallows need to be caught and banded and, unfortunately for us, the little insectivores have amazing eyesight. Brendan set up supposedly "invisible" mist-nets around the entire sketchy underside of P-K but they still eluded us.

Brendan, trying to cordon off the underside of P-K with plastic sheets to try to get the swallows to fly into the nets.

Sketchy underide of P-K, rigged with mist nets

Mostly, we just ended up lounging on the deck, watching planes fly by, their contrails making funny patterns in the sky and eliciting a sarcastic remark from Josh Moyer, the island coordinator, “Now don't work yourselves too hard!” Hey, it was Sunday.

Funny contrail patterns 

After dinner it was time for data entry. But I got very distracted by the Great Black-backed Gull chick outside Laighton being adorable! I spent a good twenty minutes crouching in the grass as it got fed and then jumped around a bit, flapping its stubby “wings”.

Foooood!

Wow, do we really belong to the same species?

I can fly! Maybe!

A portrait of Laighton chick

But we eventually got all of the data entered and are now watching the third episode of Sherlock, season 1. Best. Show. Ever.

Gulls and Guillemots, Eggs and Chicks, Playbacks and Nest Checks. Oh, and a few Flowers.

What slaves we are to weather! And by “we” I mean every single living being on this planet. Our ancestors were spot on in worshipping the Weather Gods for, as this last storm on the Appledore demonstrated to me, if by anything at all, everything is pre-destined by weather. Three days of continuous rain, 50 km/h winds and at least 7 foot waves wiped out 30% of our Herring Gull nests – a whole season's reproductive effort annihilated in the five seconds it must have taken for a wave to sweep in or a gust of wind to blow around the edge of a rock. It was a depressing sight, the banks of washed up seaweed and swirling sea foam where nests 12H290 and 12H291 should have been. Even worse was data entry yesterday where Brendan and I had to “kill” the failed nests nests, i.e., complete their “nest summaries” with 0s in the “Number of Chicks” and “Chicks Fledged” fields.

However, it's not all bad news. Many of the surviving nests are now brimming with newly-hatched, adorable, peeping balls of fluff. And as this new wave of life washes over the island, our intern duties have come to include taking blood samples from, measuring, and keeping track of each and every chick. To make it even more of a challenge, Dave left the island today meaning that we are now officially “on our own”. And it's actually quite exciting! 

Chicks A and B belonging to "the nest near Laighton"

After saying goodbye to Dave in the morning, we set off to do our nest checks and quickly discovered that, in Brendan's words, “the pooping was brutal today”. I had four new chicks to bleed and every time I attempted to grab a chick from or return a chick to a nest, the parents dumped their bodily fluids quite generously on me and liberally used my helmet for anger management. But holding the little gull chicks and knowing that, with such awesome parents to defend them, they had a significant head start in life, made it all more than worth it. And somehow, for that one hour that I spent in the gull colony trying to do things on my own since Dave was no longer there for assistance, my, erm, “considerable” fear of needles, completely disappeared. Learning curve successfully ascended! At least for today.

The rest of the day was spent walking from one marked nest to another, setting up a video camera and speakers, hitting record and play respectively, and then running away to hide in the bushes for 15 minutes while the speaker spewed two randomly selected playbacks of yeow calls that I constructed from recordings and the target bird reacted to them. There were a few mishaps where I forgot to hit record, or the camera tipped over mid-playback or the iPod decided to shuffle music started blasting Death Cab for Cutie outside K-house, but overall the experimental set up has worked out pretty well. Thus far, I've completed about 5 nests and it looks like I'll be able to get at least 10 to 15 in before all the chicks hatch (for I can't perform playbacks after the gulls have stopped incubating since then they just fly away from the nest instead of staying put and responding to playbacks). My research question has changed and evolved quite a bit since my first day at SML, but more about that in a later post, hopefully. 

Part of the experimental setup

Last evening, as the storm began to lift and the last rays of the setting Sun peeked through the purple clouds, a few of us went hunting for a Black Guillemot nest. For several weeks now we had seen a few guillemots suspiciously fly in and out from a particular area on the coast of Broad Cove. And sure enough, after a little searching and poking intro crevasses with Captain Zak's awesome light-tube-camera-thing, we found a neat cluster of four eggs wedged under a rock.

View from Broad Cove, after the storm

Brendan trying to "flash-find" a gilly nest

Captain Zak with his light-tube-camera-thing

The light-tube-camera-thing showing us four gilly eggs!

The nest

And then we turned around and enjoyed a very purple sunset. Oh and, earlier in the day yesterday, on our way back from nest checks, we had spotted three Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica) bobbing in the water off of Broad Cove and gotten a good look through a scope. A good couple of days overall. 

A very purple sunset

And, to end what seems to be a very disjointed post, as I read over it again, that I am too tired to fix, here are some pictures of all the beautiful flowers that have started to bloom around the island. I have the gulls to thank for these; the photos are a product of running down trails and diving into bushes in an attempt to get out of a bird's sight before the playback starts up, and then sitting motionless for over fifteen minutes. I've learnt to overcome the fear of it getting pooped on and tote my camera along everywhere.