Barren Islands Update #4 (2 SEP 11)

It's been a little bit since I've written an update. We've been working long hours here (read 9 am- midnight some nights...) trying to get done all the field work before the weather turns bad (we have to be out of here by the end of Sept. because that's when the really big tides come in). It's been a tough adjustment to working these long hours after a 2-week break when our crew leader was on vacation. We worked as a crew of three while he was gone and worked more sane 9-5 hours. I'm beginning to accept that when you sign up to work a field season job, you have to be prepared to work long hours when the weather holds out and then catch up on computer work, etc. during the string of rainy indoor days.

Today is the beginning of a possible 2-3 day stormy spell. Yesterday we did some storm petrel burrow searching and took the boat out to the point (where the kittiwake and murre colony is) and did field observations. We made it back in from boating around 9:40 pm, just in time to grab some food and head back out to do nighttime storm petrel mist netting. The calm, windless nights that are suitable for mist netting are few and far between, so when the weather is good, we've gotta get out. We were out until midnight last night, but thankfully the storm and rain means we get to sleep in the next day!

The length of our season out here depends on when the murres stop fledging. We're making observations of murres to get information on things like chick hatching date, egg laying length, fledging date, site productivity (measured in how many nest sites produce eggs and then how many eggs actually hatch and fledge). Right now the murres have chicks and their nestling period is ~21 days, so that means we should be here another 3 weeks or so. When the chicks hatch, they stay with their parent up on the rock. The parents take turns leaving to hunt fish to fattening up their chick. Since murres are seabirds, they grow very thick watertight feathers that insulate them against the cold sea water. Once they are ready to fledge, the chicks jump off the cliff water into the water where they stay with their father learning how to catch fish in the deep blue sea. The fledging happens at night here, where the cover of darkness protects the chicks from predation by gulls. For this bird species, "fledging" doesn't correlate with "flying." Murres are seabirds, so they learn to swim before they learn to fly.

Common murre congregation.

The colony will dissipate by the beginning of October when the birds will head for open water or bays to spend the winter feeding in deeper waters. The young will continue to stay with their father until they are completely independent. About a week after leaving the nest site, the young should be able to start feeding themselves. The other day we saw a murre fledgling out in the water with it's father from the boat! The fledgling looks just like a miniature version of the adult, very cute. The adult dove down underwater to get away from the boat, followed close behind by the fledgling. It's a sink or swim learning curve out here. The chick not only has to make it out of the egg, they have to have attentive parents to feed them enough to fatten them up and be lucky enough to avoid being nabbed by one of the many gulls and ravens that cruise around the colony.

Here's our skiff at Lonesome Cove, where the murre and kittiwake colonies are.

L to R: Dan, Margaret, Arthur.

It's a very similar story for the tufted puffin and fork-tailed storm petrel chicks. The update on the tufted puffins is much more grim. We've been checking the same burrows for over a month now, returning to remeasure the chicks in order to calculate the growth rate and weight at fledging. What we've been finding though is that these chicks are either fledging early (they weigh less than they should) or the river otters have been digging them out of their burrows and eating them. We've found evidence of river otter predation--otter scat and chick feathers outside of burrows, digging sign, and one day we even saw an adult otter carrying off a tufted puffin adult from one of our growth sites. This otter was soon joined by two little ones who came slinking over the landscape in their amusingly slinky gait. That same day we saw another group of 3 otters, so we know that there are at least 6 otters who call this island home. That is plenty to wipe out these puffin nesting sites. Some of the burrows that chicks were missing from showed no sign of digging and were too small for an adult otter to fit into.

After seeing how small the young otters are, my guess is that the young are going into the burrows and pulling out the puffin chicks. We started out at the beginning of the season with ~28 chicks in our plots and now 3 are still alive. Some of these chicks we have found dead in their burrows (most likely due to starvation). Others have seemingly been eaten by the otters, and a few seem to have gotten fat enough that we can assume they've fledged. The number of starving chicks was surprising to me. There could be a number of factors affecting the chick feeding--the parents aren't finding enough fish, the parents aren't attending the nest vigilantly (possibly because of being scared off the nest by otters and people--us--coming into the area), the parent puffins are being eaten by the otters and thus are unable to feed their chicks. It's a grim story indeed this year, but even so we're getting valuable data by seeing a definite downward trend in the survival of these chicks.

One chick the otters didn't get.

Overall, it seems as though our impact on the terrain is playing a part is the decline of the puffin population in our study areas. The otters are using our trails to get around and evidence of them has been found in each of our study sites. This years' findings are going to have an effect on how future studies are conducted here. Hopefully we'll be able to come up with less intrusive ways to study these sites that don't have as much impact on the landscape, and thus do not invite in the otters.

In other news, I've been experimenting in cooking with seaweed. My favorite finding it that the very common bull kelp fronds make a delicious seaweed salad when you add sauteed carrots, raw peanuts, onions, and a sesame oil/vinegar dressing.

I also made a tomato-based vegetable soup with garbanzo beans the other night from the cut up bull kelp stipe (stem) and pieces of the fronds. I'd like to try pickling bull kelp sometime. I still haven't figured out a good way to dry out the seaweed for storage. We don't get enough sustained sunny weather to dry them outside, and when the rains come in, if the seaweed is hanging outside to dry, the fresh water washes out all the good salt and leaves the seaweed tasting gross. I'm sticking with using the fresh stuff for now. Luckily there isn't a shortage around here!

The end of the season is going to be a push to the finish. I'm working just to maintain my stamina so that I can stick out the long days! By the end of the season I'm going to be in such great shape from all this hiking! It's no light work out here, between the hiking, rock climbing, and hauling gear and the boat up and down the beach. I'll try to write again nearer the end of our time here.

Happy Labor Day everyone! I hope this email finds you well.

Warmly,

Margaret Alice