Wildlife Photography and Experiences with Brennan: June 2013

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Country Island Update V

HEY!!!

So, here is another update!

Jess wants a proper introduction. She is super awesome and I will explain her studies further in a later blog.

We now know about 16 active Roseate Tern Nests, and banded our first Roseate chick and adult! Our Arctic and Common chicks are beginning to hatch in full force, which is keeping us quite busy with our banding and measurements! We’re following 60 Arctic and 60 Common Tern nests, and all 16 Roseate Tern nests! Out of the 120 Arctic/Common Tern nests, we’re following them all for hatch success, a subset of that for productivity (if they make it to 15 and 20 days old), a subset of that for feeding watches, and we’re doing growth measurements for half of our nests.

We are following a nest with a clutch of four, which is interesting, because terns don’t often have four eggs! The eggs are just starting to hatch, hopefully all four of them do!

We’re not quite done our species ratio, but so far it seems like we have more arctic terns than commons here this year!

On the birding front, we found a juvenile Black Tern and our Short-billed Dowitchers are starting to show up! That puts us at about 110 or 111 birds on the year!

Exciting times at Country Island!

Brennan

Monday, June 24, 2013

Country Island Update Part IV

BUSY! BUSY! BUSY! For the rest of the season, we’ll be quite busy as chicks are hatching, and a lot of our monitoring has picked up!

On Thursday, we completed the Tern Census, and found out that we have over 1300 nests on the island so far. Our fourth addition to the Country Island family (Jess) arrived for the census, and now there are four of us on the Island! Jess is here for some of her Masters work, with Radio Tagged Arctic and Common terns. There will be late nesters or terns that will re-nest, so in a couple of weeks we will conduct a second tern census to get a good idea of what the tern population is this year.

Now that we’re done the census, we are now determining the species ratio between Arctic and Common Terns. Basically, we’re counting the Arctic and Common Terns in a random subset of our 317 grid cells to determine the Arctic-Common Ratio on the island this year.

We’re quite busy monitoring nests each day (checking two blinds a day), and we’re now banding and measuring chicks! We have about 50 chicks banded running around now, but we’re finding more and more each day!

We saw a Northern Mocking bird and a possible Eastern Phoebe, which puts us at 108 or 109 birds!

Will update more Later

Brennan

Monday, June 17, 2013

Well, I’m back! I had a week vacation visiting my Grandma in PEI, but now I’m back on Country Island for the rest of the season! And Oh, Man! We’re busy! We have a lot work to do!

You can see some of my photos from before my vacation here.

Since I came back, we spent a day and a half completing the Eider Census (Counting all the eider nests over pretty much the whole island), and started the Tern Census (Counting all the tern nests in the tern colony). We also had researchers (but they left yesterday) from Acadia and Dalhousie come trap 15 arctic and 14 common terns to put bands and radio transmitters on them! We got to help, and I got to catch about 7 or 8 individuals for them!!

Some interesting points of note:
We counted:
246 Eider Nests
22 Willet Nests (but there are a few places we haven’t checked yet where we know they are)
11 Red Breasted Merganser Nests
So far, we found over 120 Tern nests (My prediction is 1516).

We also had our first starring tern egg yesterday!! This means our eggs will start hatching any day now, and we’ll start banding chicks this week!

We have 15 Roseate on Nests that we have found! We will very likely find a few more in the next few days!!

Oh, Megan saw a Sabine’s Gull!! (Lucky her!) Our bird species list is now at 107 birds! I think we’ll hit 120, but maybe I’m being a bit ambitious!

All since Thursday!

On Wednesday, we’ll have a few people come join us to finish off the Tern census, including our fourth person joining us on the island! Until then, we’re going to do some work around our blinds, and if the weather cooperates, continue on with the census!

Brennan

Monday, June 10, 2013

Country Island - MEGA UPDATE WITH LOTS OF PHOTOS!

WELL.

Long time no see!

First off, my apologies for not updating my blog lately! We were having internet problems at Country Island and thus I haven't had much internet access until now (Thank you Tim Hortons!)!!!

I was in a rush writing this, so please forgive me. I am now on the last couple days of my week break (Megan and Charmaine has already taken theirs!). I'm headed back to CI hopefully tomorrow morning, so these will be all the photos you get for now! There will be a ton of work to do for the rest of the season when I get back, so I'm getting pretty excited for that!

But I will try and update you when that work comes! For this blog, I will show what we've done or seen the past 5 weeks!

We've seen Birds! Lots of them! We are now at 106 bird species on the year (Crushing the record from the past 16 years!). Megan and Charmaine added a Dovekie and Manx Shearwaters (A lifer! :( ), since I left! Lucky them! We've still got a few that will come for sure that we haven't seen yet (Short Billed Dowitcher, Whimbrel, Puffin etc!)

Anyways. Photos! Here they are!

We've been eating well!