Preface: It's Late, I'm Tired

Welcome to the mad house ladies and gentleman; the breeding season has officially begun. Eggs, eggs and, hey look over there, more eggs. Western Gulls are now for the most part aggressively defending full clutches of three eggs, Common Murres are popping out their single beautifully painted green egg, Brandt’s Cormorants have constructed fair built nests with some containing the first of five eggs, and Cassin’s Auklets are hatching their first chicks of potentially two broods. All of these eggs equate to many hours of sitting in wooden boxes staring through scopes; following the incubation, rearing, and fledging of all breeding species for the next two months. Luckily we get a fresh shipment of coffee beans every two weeks.

Last night was a double header, diet sampling for Cassin’s Auklets and mist netting for storm-petrels. Shortly after writing the daily journal and finishing the superb chocolate java chip brownies Emma prepared for use, we downed a healthy serving of coffee and under the cover of darkness made our way to North Landing. The team and I spread out in an area retiled with Cassin’s burrows and waited for the mates coming in for their nightly change over. Birds with chicks are now flying in with crops full of krill, and our mission was to intercept ten birds to collect this bounty of crop krill. Catching them proved difficult for me anyway, but luckily one flew right into my chest and landed in my arms. Unfortunately it refused to regurgitate any krill. This data is part of a long term look at the diet of Cassin’s Auklets, and has shown interesting trends in foraging bouts by parents when the krill is plentiful (which it appears to be this year), and when it’s scarce. Aside from the impact of a hefty incoming Rhino Auklet to the cranium, the sampling went well.

Shorty after wiping the euphausiids from our coat sleeves, we trekked up Lighthouse Hill and sit up a thinly threaded net designed to catch small birds (known as a mist net) in an attempt to snag some very interesting seabirds called storm-petrels. More than half of the world’s population of Ashy Storm-petrels breeds on the Farallon Islands. They are some of the smallest true seabirds, about the size of a barn swallow, and yet are closely related and share a similar life history to albatrosses, the largest group of birds that roam the open seas. Storm-petrels are crevice nesters, returning each night to relieve the mate from incubation and rearing duties. Ashy’s lay a single egg in a protracted breeding season that generally extends from May to October. We managed to capture, weigh, measure, and band 130 birds in a 3 hour period from 11PM to 2AM; mostly consisting of Ashy’s with a handful of Least and Dark-rumped Storm Petrels. Information gleaned from this long term banding data set has shown that Ashy’s can live to be at least 30 years of age, likely longer. Storm-petrels are fascinating birds that we know relatively little about…possible graduate work?