Saturday 1 July 2017, week 7: Buldir Island

“Got one!” may be read as a phrase full of excitement. Oh boy, something’s been found! Hearing that phrase when Kevin, McKenzie, and I are all walking the boulder beach is not a welcome pronouncement here on Buldir. It indicates one of us has spotted part of a dead bird, which is not bad news in itself. After all, everything dies eventually. No, the news is unfortunate because it means yet another stop to measure, tag, photograph, and record data for our COASST surveys.

Most of the work we do for AK Maritime is rather enjoyable. Learning to navigate our plots, finding and monitoring various species’ nests from incubation through chick fledging, hiking across the island to Spike Camp, collecting diet samples, taming our trails with machetes, and living on a far-flung island make for a good life. The task that we never look forward to is our biweekly COASST survey. (Those letters stand for something, but I can’t find what for in our guidebook.) So, it’s now what Kevin made up on the spot: Conserving Our Assorted SeaSide Treasures.

COASST is a citizen science program run by the University of Washington and other agency collaborators. All along the West Coast and on various beaches across Alaska, citizens – or seasonal UFWS employees – search for dead birds or measurable parts of birds. Then these birds are identified down to species, ideally, based on either how true to life the dead birds are or based on foot type, culmen (bill), tarsus (leg), and wing measurements.

On Buldir probably 75% of our dead birds are identifiable based on measurements alone. Plenty of times we have just a single wing, foot, or head to measure because the body part is a component of a gull pellet; lots of our finds end up as UNAU: unidentified auklet.

Scouring three different beaches for any dead bird bit and then deciding if said bit is measurable or has already rotted too much, is far from entertaining. There’s no need to even mention the fantastic odors that emanate from some birds, or the questionable watery, slippery wetness with which some birds are covered. The positive in our situation is that we have a fairly efficient system after having spent all of last summer tackling these beached birds together. McKenzie records data, Kevin measures and tags the birds, and I prep the tagging gear, write our label, and take the pictures.

Over roughly 5 ½ hours we encountered 57 beached bird bits that we could measure and work up along our 3 beach segments today. 33 of those birds were new finds from our last survey. That’s 57 “got ones!” during our span of navigating our way over Buldir’s lovely boulder beaches. No wonder our announcements end up ranging from a sigh of resignation, to false enthusiasm, to expressionless fatigue. Our brains are always pretty mushy by the end of these surveys.

We know the data is important in that it becomes part of a long-term monitoring database that’s essential in following the health of marine ecosystems. By having baseline data on what’s normal for beached birds, the significance of changes and catastrophic events like oil spills or massive die-offs can be better understood.

Despite the role of the data, COASST is still our least favorite activity. Good thing McKenzie made us some chocolate chocolate chip cookies tonight. There’s more than “got one!” on those cookies for all of us.