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

Duct-taped Hats and E87

It has been a fairly exciting three days on Appledore since my last post. I'll try to go in the chronological order this time, instead of starting with today and then traveling back in time, although I made an exciting discovery today. But more about that later.

On Tuesday, Brendan, Phil, Tricia (“Tree”) and I went over to White and Seavey islands to help the Haywards and the Tern Interns to conduct an island-wide census of tern nests. And by island-wide I mean an area about the size of a football field, though, of course, rockier. I was amazed to find that, after tallying up the numbers at the end of the survey, we found that there are 2044 nests on the island this year! And apparently this is a decrease – there were over 2400 last year. Just by eyeballing it, it looked like around 3 to 5 terns could nest within one Herring Gull territory!

The censusing process itself was quite an experience. Preparations involved duct-taping socks to our hats, for the terns dive-bomb but their beaks are too fragile and can break on bike-helmets, and filling our pockets with popsicle sticks, which we used to mark the nests as we counted them.

The headgear, on Brendan

All eleven of us lined up on one side of the island and then walked across it, shouting out the egg number for every nest we encountered as the birds rose up in a cloud and dived at us, their sharp beaks poking holes in the duct tape and their machine-gun calls filling our ears. And then suddenly, for about the space of a breath, they went dead silent. I looked up from the nest I was shoving a popsicle stick under and saw the whole colony of terns rise up and fly away from us, towards the water... and then turn right around and come rushing back at us, machine gun noises louder than ever before! It was the most unreal experience, as if someone had pressed the mute button by accident and then, apologizing and fumbling, accidentally turned the volume way up high in an attempt to unmute; a common enough incident, I suppose, except not in the natural world. And of course, there is a term for this behavior –“dread flight”. Apparently, gulls do it to and I dearly wish a Bald Eagle would fly over the island so I could film a gull “dread flight”.

Terns in the air during the tern census

Wednesday dawned cold and rainy. But of course, nests need to be checked in all weather short of a hurricane. The wet chicks looked pitiful with their wet down plastered down (hehe) over their puny little bodies and the pink knobbly skin over their spines poking out on their backs. I could easily tell the “good” parents from the “bad” ones from the degree of wetness of their chicks, and, as I found out today, some of the chicks unlucky enough to have very “bad” parents who didn't do a good job of sheltering them, didn't make it. Interestingly enough, all of the dead chicks I found today were either B or C chicks (as opposed to A chicks) further corroborating the prevalent idea that hatching early gives gull chicks a distinct advantage.

Thankfully today was, is, bright and sunny and I was able to take a zodiac out here to Smuttynose island and find some more Herring Gulls to conduct playbacks on. I scoured the trail leading to the east end of the island but the area was covered with Great Black-backed Gulls, and after two hours of searching, I had only found two Herring nests. It was hot and my backpack was heavy so I headed back to the “center”, dropped off everything but my speakers, notebook and binoculars near where Island Archaeology students were digging for artifacts and bones, and decided to stroll out towards the west of the island which I had never seen before. There were more Black-backed Gulls, yeowing their low, almost cow-like yeows and diving low over me. A few rock hops into walking along the coast, however, the monotony of Black-backed yeows was broken by a sharper, shriller yeow that made me reach into my backpack to check if I'd left my iPod on. Nope, I hadn't, it was a live Herring Gull and, what's more, I realized as it flew out of the bushes lining the coast, it had a bright green field-readable band on its leg! E87. Huzzah for the second banded gull I've spotted on Smuttynose this summer! I looked up its history in the Gull Database when I got back to Appledore and apparently it was banded on Sandpiper Beach as a chick in 2006 and had only ever been re-sighted once, off the Isles of Shoals. So it's exciting to know that it has returned to the isles and is nesting on Smuttynose!

A video grab of E87 returning to his nest

The more I think about it, and the more questions I get asked at the dinner table (like, what exactly are you doing with all this data?), I realize that even though these gulls that I'm studying are so common, so (relatively) easy to observe, we yet know so little about them – for example, we still can't explain why E87 ended up on Smuttynose instead of Appledore – because they are just so complex and just so... alive! It's hard to classify them, to set up a cause and effect model for their behavior, to take into account all of the factors that determine what they do. I mean, how many of can explain our own actions? I can't really explain why I love working with birds that try to kill me everyday; I just know that I do!

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.