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