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