Now that I’ve been back on my original island home for a month, I figured I should recap that with which we’ve been busy.
Although my writing frequency doesn’t indicate it, this has honestly been the most relaxed month I’ve ever spent working in the field. I learned before coming back out to St. George that the red- and black-legged kittiwakes generally follow a 2 year productivity cycle of a good year of many nests, many eggs, and many fledglings and then a bad year with less successful reproduction. This year happens to fall in the low of the cycle, which is a bummer and yet also interesting for me to compare to my stint out here during the highly productive 2010.
We arrived – without a glitch in our travel – back on May 15th. We’ve spent the first few weeks getting settled, hiking to various parts of the island, resighting both least auklet and kittiwake bands, and mapping out the birds in our study plots.
For least auklets we spend a few hours sitting behind a little rock wall in the 100,000+ bird colony as we use binoculars to spot colored bands in various combinations on the birds’ legs. Resighting kittiwake bands involves walking along a number of beaches at the base of short cliffs or looking across/down from the top of high cliffs. We use both binoculars and spotting scopes to read their red/blue alphanumeric or numeric bands. Seeing specific birds over the years gives biologists in the office the chance to gauge the general survival and health of the populations. The oldest banded kittiwakes we’ve seen this year were banded in 1992, making for some pretty old seabirds.
Relatively early on we noticed we weren’t seeing as many unique least auklet bands as usual, which indicated another year of earlier-than-average nesting in the crevices the auklets inhabit. That put Laney to work searching for crevice nests, locating previous years’ crevices to check, and orienting herself to the colony.
In the meantime Jason and I have been puttering away with kittiwake resights and waiting for signs of nests. We witnessed a few days of kittiwake highways between ponds and cliffs as they flew around with nest material in their mouths, but nothing much has come of that early June action. When we look at the cliffs, we see a variety of things happening:
- pairs “doing the nasty,” as one friend of mine puts it
- one kittiwake just standing on top of its mate
- birds sleeping
- birds excitedly stomping down their nest material in the shape of a bowl
- birds staring at their own feet
- birds preening
What we hadn’t seen until the last week or so were any kittiwakes on eggs. Now there are well more than a handful up on High Bluffs and some on the cliffs just below town, but few of the birds seem that invested in incubating. Oftentimes we see a sleeping bird standing over an egg in its nest. The cliffs at Rosy Finch beach turned from a little city of kittiwakes to a ghost town in recent days.
2014 was supposedly the most highly productive season in recent years, so it seems that reproduction just may not be all that important to the kittiwakes this year. If that is indeed the case, determining whether our birds are sitting on eggs/chicks or not will be very easy.
The murres may be a different story, since their highs and lows aren’t nearly as extreme. We’ve been resighting their bands, as well, which involves praying they’ll reposition their stance in their packed places on the cliffs. (Murres have no concept of personal space whatsoever.) In local news I was told a thick-billed murre egg was seen today. They should start laying toward the end of the week, so we’ll see what they decide to do!
In our downtime we’ve stayed busy cooking and baking tasty things, trading field camp and travel stories, reading, birding, and wondering if planes bearing mail and food have landed or not.
I’ve also been slowly trying out my running form and running shoe transition. So far, so good with regards to shin pain. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen in love with a pair of running shoes, yet that seems to be happening now. When I’m in my lightweight Montrails, running on the balls of my feet rather than heel striking, I feel springy like a kangaroo! ‘roo shoes for the win.
The real driving force behind our work plans is the foggy weather. Our honeymoon weather ended with the month of May, and now we spend a lot of our foggy days entering data. I fully admit that the sunny weather was nice, but St. George didn’t feel like the home I recalled until the winds and fog arrived with June.