Hello from Metinic Island!
Just as everybody else, we’ve been busy with chicks here this week. Every day we visit the colony to band any new chicks within our productivity plots – and with the amount of babies that we have now, this takes us about 3.5 hours on average! Each chick within a plot gets weighed and their wing measured, while new chicks get a band. Luckily, banding the chicks is now swift and easy (after all, most are only about the size of our palms!). It’s very exciting to see them grow right before our eyes. When we first band them (at about 1-2 days old), some are only 12 grams, but now our oldest chicks (about a week old) are upwards of 60 grams! They truly do grow up so fast…
We also spend several hours monitoring specific nests for provisioning studies. While sitting in one of the blinds, we make note of any prey items that parent birds feed to their chicks. This has been one of my favorite parts of the job so far, because I love observing the terns’ natural behaviors – sometimes I feel like I’m watching a reality show!
In between tern monitoring, we’ve also been checking up on active black guillemot burrows. Most have 1-2 eggs by now, although we found a surprise one recently with 3! They’ll hatch soon enough, and eventually we’ll be banding those little guys too (I’m really looking forward to that).
For now it looks like we’re in for a rainy weekend, but our banding and provisioning efforts will surely ramp up within the next week.
Until then!
Liz
Leave a comment