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.   

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.

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. 

Rained In Goodbyes

Normally, I'm all for rain. The smells, the sounds and just the kind of undefinable sweetly melancholic feeling it stirs up inside one. But it has been raining for three consecutive days on Appledore now (and is going to rain all day tomorrow too) and the itch to get out of the Commons is killing me.

The view from the Commons. Or, rather, the lack of a view.

Of course, it didn't help that the storm came a-calling just when I was finally getting around to setting up playback experiments. I got two nests done on Friday, was feeling very good about it and excited to continue and get a ton of nests tested before the chicks hatch, and then I woke up on Saturday to iPod-killing weather that dashed all my dreams in the mud.

However, I have to admit, the weather is still beautiful. I went to check my nests yesterday when my antsy-ness got the better of me, and, after finishing up on Pepperell cove, a bit of rocky coast on the western shore, I just stood there for a couple of minutes, looking out over the sea, getting buffeted by gusts of sea-spray laden wind and watching the gulls swoop and soar gracefully with what looked like sheer exhilaration. One of those “this-is-why-I-am-here-and-nowhere-else” moments.

In other news, today is the last day of Field Ornithology and most of the class leaves today. We... were not able to break the Course Bird List record.. but we got really close and saw some amazing birds in the process. In the end, it is how much you appreciate, enjoy and understand the birds rather than how many birds you can brag about having seen. This was, hands down, one of the best classes I have ever taken, anywhere, and all of the people who are leaving today will be missed. However, I promise to keep this blog updated with news of how the gulls are doing (let me know if you have any specific nests you'd like me to keep track of!) and, very soon, post lots of adorable photos of fluffy, peeping chicks (If this weather lets up... grr...)!

Field Ornithology, 2012

Field Ornithology 2012, Breaking Records All the Way

This post is a shout out to all of my Field Ornithology classmates + Sarah and Dave. We had a great day of dedicated birding yesterday where we birded both on the island as well as on the mainland (at Creek Farm), and of course, on the boat ride to and fro, and racked up a total of 79 species, breaking the previous day record for the Field Ornithology class by a whole 8 species! And that too without getting normal, common species like Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea), Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) and Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura). 

The total 79 + a mammal list, on the right

So, basically, you guys are awesome and I'm so glad I decided to take this course this summer. I'm sure we're going to break the course bird list record by the end of the week!

Wilson's Phalarope, Prettiest Shorebird Ever?

I have only a half hour to write this post before the day's bird list. Hence, I must prioritize. Hence, I must write about the female Wilson's Phalarope that showed up on the island yesterday and is, as of now, still hanging around, pecking at things and swimming prettily in the swale.

Backing up a little, we had a seabird cruise yesterday where we got on the Heiser and, to use Sarah's phrase, “booked it” south till we were well out of sight of the mainland and the isles. It was a gray day and the boat wasn't the steadiest. We saw absolutely no Wilson's Storm-petrels (which is incredibly weird because I remember them being quite abundant last year), much less fulmars or shearwaters. We did see a Fin Whale. For about a minute. Needless to say, we weren't the happiest bunch when our feet touched land again.

And then, right when the last of us stepped off the boat, the radio crackled and Phil yelled, “Dave! Bill wants you to go to the swale. He says he has something you would like to look at!”.. or something to that effect. That made all of us perk up a little but we figured it was probably a Greater Yellowlegs or something. So we ambled towards the swale and, as we turned the bend, saw all of the bird banders from the banding station crowded together, long lenses on camera pointed towards the most beautiful and elegant shorebird that I have ever seen. Here, judge for yourself. She was being most co-operative. In about ten minutes, Brendan, Sarah and I were sprawled out in the mud, and gull and goose poop at the edge of the swale, clicking away. And, I must admit, I was whimpering. Not just because the bird was absolutely beautiful but also because a "normal", female Wilson's Phalarope would currently be in the North-Western United States, not the extreme North-East, i.e., off the coast of Maine!

In the Wilson's Phalarope, as in many other shorebirds of the same family, the mating system is polyandrous. That means that the female mates with a bunch of males, with the male taking care of the clutch of eggs that she lays with him while she moves on to the next one. Hence, the female is the brighter and more attractive of the pair. She also seems to have the ability, or should I say the magnetic power, to keep me glued in the mud for forever, just looking at her through my bins in simple, complete admiration.