Country Island Excitement Part II

In about three weeks, I'll be on Country Island.... and can hardly believe it!  There is SO MUCH to do in the next two weeks before I leave for the East Coast!!  If you want to know where this Island is, or why we are there, read my previous blog post : Country Island Excitement Part I

There are a ton of different things we'll be doing....  We'll conduct censuses for Common Eiders and Terns. A census involves counting all the individuals on the island.  For the Tern census, we'll count all the Tern nests on the island by recording the number of nests in each 10m x 10m grid, 531 in total.  After the census, we'll determine how many Common, Arctic and Roseate Terns are at each grid by sitting in portable blinds, and waiting for an adult to return to brood their nest.

  If you look closely, you can see the grids being marked by PVC pipes.

Tern nests come in all forms of shapes and sizes! (Hmm... I might have another blog post about this in the future!).  

Roseate Terns like to hide there nests under cover like rocks, large pieces of wood, or in nest shelters!  Can you find the in this photo??

This is either a common tern, or arctic tern nest.  (They look pretty much identical)

Common Tern Chicks in their nest.  As you can see, they have been coloured!  We colour them so that we can find them later to measure their growth, and for chick feeding purposes.  

Chick Feeding is another component of the work on CI...It involves sitting in blinds for two hour stints, and monitoring all chick feeding events for targeted nests... Chick feeding involves identifying the species of prey, the size of the prey, and how frequently feeding events are occurring. 

    Here are a couple of Common Tern chicks begging for food from their parents

We'll also be measuring the growth and productivity of chicks... In particular, we measure tarsus, wing chord, mass and age.

Arctic and/or Common Tern Chicks

Roseate Tern Chick

Other work involves meadow vole monitoring, predator watches, predator control (remove nests, use pyrotechnics etc...), re-sighting Roseate Terns, avi-fauna monitoring, leach's storm petrel research, and more....

Here is a Leach's Storm Petrel.  They're a really cool bird that makes burrows into the ground.  They only lay one egg, and incubate it for up to 60 days!  There are thousands of them that come out at night, and they have a really cool goblin sounding call!  Its a treat listening to them! :)