Country Island Update – VII

Its scary how fast this field season is going by!  We are approaching our last couple of weeks on CI, and we are now having an idea on our departure date.  Our Helicopter is booked for June 30^th, 31^st or August 1^st, so it looks like we’ll be leaving around then. Jess will be leaving a bit earlier to work on some school stuff.

BUT! This isn’t the end of the season yet! There is still a couple more weeks of work to do!! Although most of our nests we are monitoring are now hatched, and some of our nests are completed, we are still keeping busy.  Most of our chicks we are monitoring are now getting up there in age (Over 20 days!!) and our work becomes more difficult because they are more mobile (many are now flying!!!), and they can still hide quite well.  Because of this, we are now shifting some of our efforts to re-sighting.

Since my last update, we completed our second tern census! We found over 75 late nesters in half the colony, which means throughout the whole season, we’ve had around 1500 tern nests (And roughly 2/3 of those are ARTEs!!).

On the birding front, things have been pretty slow.  We added semi-palmated sandpipers to our bird list, which puts us at 118 birds for the season! Two more to reach our 2^nd goal of 120 birds! (Originally we predicted we’d get around 100).

I’ve been taking lots of photos, and will have lots to share for a few weeks!

Anyways, this may or may not be my last update from Country Island.  Not sure yet.   Our internet has been choppy, so this may be the last of it I get! 

The field season is going by too fast!! .

Brennan

Country Island Update VI

Well, we’re keeping busy!!  This post will be a few quick notes that I can think of…

Since my last update, we had 4 ½ days straight of rain which kept us out of the colony, and it gave us a bit of a set-back.  It made the following days quite busy, but we’re all caught up now!! When the colony is wet, we can’t do our work, so we got behind in our banding and measuring.  This was pretty bad timing since most of our chicks hatched within those four days!

But we’re now getting in a good routine of pred watch and GIS, chick feeding watches, and our monitoring.  Most of our roseate nests now have chicks, and many are starting to leave their nests which making tracking them very difficult.  So a lot of time spent will be on roseate re-sights as well. 

Oh, and in 4 days, we'll be doing our 2nd Tern census to count all of our late nesters!

On a side note, an interesting part of the project this year is Jess’ Masters project.  She placed radio transmitters on 29 birds to track their movements.  Its really cool, because she has picked up signals from other birds with radio transmitters, which is likely either Ipswich sparrows or Gulls from Sable island, or tagged Blackpolls! It will be interesting to hear more about that!

We had our last visitors leave the island on Thursday, so now it’s the four of us for the next few weeks, and soon we’ll be all out of fresh food…. Good thing we’ve got lots of canned foods!!

On the new birds front, we got a Common Nighthawk, a Blue Winged teal, Whimbrels, a Thick billed Murre, and a few Atlantic Puffins!  116 birds on the year!  Still gunning for 120+! 

Brennan