…And breakfast, and lunch! For four days every week we each perform a “provisioning” stint of three hours. During provisioning stints, we observe our selected 5-7 nests of chicks to see what their parents are bringing them to eat and how often each chick is getting fed. We record the prey type, the size of the prey in comparison the to adult’s bill length, which chick from which nest is getting fed, and the time of the feeding. Charlie has been watching 6 Arctic Tern nests, with a total of 6 chicks, and Jennie has been watching 6 Common Tern nests with a total of 12 chicks! You cant leave the blind during a provisioning stint, so if you need to pee it means taking a trip to ye ol’ coffee can…
Common Tern Provisioning nests (Orange Flags)
In order to tell all our chicks apart we color them with markers! Each nest is a different color, and then if there is more than one chick in the nest, the first born chick (the A chick) gets colored on the head, and the second born chick (the B chick) gets colored on the breast. It is quite entertaining to watch little brightly colored chicks run around!
Two Common Tern provisioning chicks. The purple head denotes an "A" chick, and the purple breast is the "B" chick.
One of the big challenges of provisioning is to correctly identify the fish species. This can be difficult since some of the feedings happen extremely fast! Those chicks are hungry! Some of our common fish are Atlantic Herring, Butterfish, Pollock, Sand Lance, Hake, Needlefish and a variety of invertebrates. From our observations, we can analyze the chicks’ diet composition and feeding rate.
A Common Tern with a Pollock
