The three main monitoring objectives of the US Fish and Wildlife Service on St. Paul are productivity, survival, and population counts/estimates of kittiwakes, murres, and cormorants. Productivity monitoring, checking the status of followed nests every three days at various plots around the island, represents the bulk of the work. Survival monitoring comes in second, involving securing plastic field readable color bands on either chicks or adults, and resighting them in subsequent years when they return to breed. Yesterday, the red-faced cormorant chicks in this photo were outfitted with a shiny new engraved metal band on the right leg and a yellow plastic numeric field readable band on the left. In total we were able to reach five nests containing twelve chicks large enough to receive bands. We also took a few morphometric measurements (wing chord, tarsus length, and weight) and plucked some breast feathers for a PhD student working with stable isotopes. Hands on work is always a welcomed relief from passive monitoring, even when the birds regurgitate onto your pants and attempt to take out an eye.
Canon EOS 60D, Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM + 1.4x, ISO-640 f/6.3 @ 1/250 sec.
Not sure what's going on with the font...
No comments:
Post a Comment