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. 

Why "The 'Yeow' Call", you ask?

I was stewing away in the library, sitting by the window and studying Organic Chemistry for my final exam tomorrow, when I looked up from the mind-boggling hexagonal shapes for a split second to take a sip of coffee and, at that exact moment, the setting sun broke through the heavy bank of purple clouds that had lined the sky all day. It flashed bright orange, the light reflecting off of wet walkways on the Arts Quad and I just had to lay aside all useless cramming of information that I don't want nor will ever need and instead employ my time in doing something more productive. Hence, this.


Also, a from-a-year-ago-but-inspired-by-the-sun-today photo of sunset on Appledore

The countdown stands at nine days and the research project I'm going to be working on at Shoals has started to take a more definite form. The island is host to mainly two gull species – the Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus) and the Herring Gull (Larus argentatus). These gulls breed on the island during the warm(er) summer months in dense mixed-species colonies, coming in close contact with each other. A number of social interactions ensue – from fighting over territories and eating each others' eggs to dutifully feeding their chicks and dive-bombing intruders; a gull colony is never a dull place. These gregarious birds also have a number of difference vocalizations, each used for a specific purpose. Common ones include the long-drawn courtship called the 'mew' call, the shriller, trumpeted, territorial 'long' call, the 'kek kek kek' given upon disturbance and finally, the call I'm interested in, which is also used to signal a potential threat, the infamous 'yeow' call.

The call consists of a clear, sharp, (comparatively) high-pitched note of descending frequency that is given either singly or repeated continuously. Other gulls have been observed to react to this call by becoming alert and looking around as well as, at times, chiming in with the originally calling bird. Additionally, both Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls respond similarly to calls given by individuals of their own species and those of the other species. And, even more additionally, it sounds like the nature of the call depends on the level of threat – calls given in response to a high threat-level sound different than those elicited at low threat-levels.

My question, then, is what exactly do the birds change in their calls to signal the threat-level; that is to say, is the call given in response to a high threat-level of a higher frequency? Or are there, perhaps, shorter intervals between successive calls? Or, perhaps, each individual call is longer? There are countless possibilities, countless variations a gull can make to a simple 'yeow' call. Going through a bunch of recordings (coursey of Sarah MacLean, one of the interns last year), however, I have been able to identify a couple of parameters that change significantly between the two threat-levels (high and low). This summer (correction: in nine days) I will attempt to answer my question by artificially changing these parameters on recorded calls and then playing them back to gulls and recording their responses. By my prediction, the gulls' level of agitation will be higher in response to the calls manipulated to signal a high-threat level, thus showing that the two parameters are indeed varied by the gulls themselves to signal threat-level, and that other gulls pick up on these variations and understand their meaning.

Screenshot of a Herring Gull 'yeow' call being analyzed in RavenPro 1.4

The experiment will involve a lot of setting speakers near gull nests and then hiding in bushes that may or may not contain poison ivy to observing the gulls and note their response. The second, more uncomfortable, element may be eliminated by using a video camera but the idea of leaving a piece of expensive equipment unattended near a gull nest isn't the most compelling and remains to be deliberated. Either way, it sounds like a promising or, at the very least, fun project and I hope to faithfully report each and every misadventure and guano-hit that befalls me along the way!

Today, however, I leave you with a panoramic view of part of the island from Kiggins Commons, the dining hall cum place to hang out if you want wireless.

View from Kiggins -- a part of the northern half of Appledore