Since my last correspondence, our colony changed from no fledged Common Terns to almost entirely up in the air. Our first fledgling took to the skies on July 13th. Many of our terns soon discovered the potential of their wings during the following week. The young terns fly quite awkwardly at first, crash landing as they return to the ground. In short order, they mastered the art of flight. We are seeing plenty of fledglings follow their parents on foraging journeys beyond the shelter of Ship Island.
Chicks from productivity plot C
There is a reduction in tern numbers here as some terns depart their nesting grounds for the year. However, we are still seeing our last wave of nests hatch. Some of these nests were laid more than a month after our initial eggs. It is fascinating to still see small newborn chicks wandering around masses of fledglings. We recently surpassed 1000 banded chicks over the summer. Surprisingly, we are still seeing plenty of unbanded birds.
Common Tern chick resting on a pinecone carried in by the tides
Despite our successful nesting season thus far, we are now seeing the disadvantages of so many terns on one beach. Competition for food is fierce; many of our chicks lost substantial amounts of weight. Food scarcity or possible disease has resulted in hundreds of our chicks perishing. While this is not ideal, it is sometimes the reality of working in seabird colonies. We are hoping that the menu options for our remaining terns will soon improve over the coming days. At least the weather has finally improved, which allows us to better monitor the colony.
In terms of weather not much has changed since I last wrote as there continues to be regular fog and an occasional rain cloud. There have been a few sunny days scattered around but with any seabird season, the progress of the birds carries on whatever the skies look like.
For a couple of weeks now we’ve completed routine checks of our black guillemot crevices that dot the rocky shoreline around the perimeter of the island. Each time out, we repeatedly have been graced with the joyful squeals from newly hatched chicks along with the fighting antics of the hefty porkers who have been around for awhile. A fan favorite for just about all of us, BLGU checks have been a sight for sore eyes given how limited we’ve been able getting into the tern colony.
Laying one to two eggs in shallow rocky crevices, guillemots give us the ability to practice our grubbing skills, a valued asset in the field of seabird biology. With bodies kinked and bent across rocks and arms awkwardly stuck into entrances, grubbing becomes a game of search and feel as you try to reach every possible corner where a chick may have run off to hide. If and when you are successful in finding the ball of fluff, you’re quickly greeted with the ever-adoring cry of one very angry baby and oft on occasion the warm welcome of a splash of guano running down your arm and hand.
Adult black guillemot captured at a nest with newly hatched chicks awaiting its own work up of measurements and rereading its identification band.
After about a day or two old, guillemot chicks quite often turn into what we call vicious little monsters. Once your hand goes into the crevice, they make ever due effort to avoid and battle you in trying to be weighed, measured, and eventually banded once they become big enough. They carry a certain type of zest for such little creatures and inevitably leave us with a good laugh each time we’re able to get them out and handle them. Their spunk is appreciated and we do our best to minimize how much we have to bother them though even when we aren’t there I just know they’re off causing a ruckus.
Field technician Adrianna happily displaying a recently grubbed downy guillemot chick.
Away from the shoreline back in the main colony, many of our tern chicks have continued to hang in there after an unfortunate loss of a number of others following a rain event at the start of the month. It appears most nests have maintained at least one chick and with a steady flow of sand lance coming in for diet, they’ve grown to the point where we’ve finally seen a few take flight for the very first time! There’s a sort of warmth and feeling of accomplishment when you get to look out and see a newly fledged tern flutter around as it gets its new airborne bearings sorted out because on the most basic level, it indicates some degree of success for the season but of course then to the eventual end to our time here this summer.
An almost fully feathered Arctic tern chick awaiting the coming day it can up and take off from this foggy rock to fend for itself.
As the birds get ready to leave, we’ve completed several band sweeps of our own to distribute additional ID bands to as many robust chicks outside our monitoring plots as possible. This involves the fun task of finding those who have come to do a great job at hiding following long tunnels they’ve carved into the tall grass or picking up the easy ones whose tail feathers poke out from beneath the rock they thought has concealed them so well failing to realize it only covers about half of their body.
It’s strange to think we go here over two months ago and that in two short weeks Metinic will be mostly empty again. There will be a lot of data entry, proofing, gear cleaning, and our final nest checks to see what the season’s overall success ends up looking like but one thing for sure is it’ll feel bittersweet as it will be difficult to leave but also nice to return to life back on the mainland.
We’ll see what the final days hold but until next time, an island’s greeting from Metinic’s Ryan Potter
Our Common Tern chicks continue to grow, while we await our first fledgling. With the large quantity of nesting terns this year, we are noticing plenty of territorial behavior between the adults and chicks. This also means that the chicks are spreading out far over the island. We recently found chicks and nests in the center of the island far from the main portion of the colony. We are also seeing an increasingly higher number of chicks run to the ocean for cover as we walk through the colony. While it is satisfying to see chicks touching the sea for the first time, they would be better suited staying hidden until they can better fend for themselves.
Ship Island chicks from productivity plot F
We are continuing to band chicks throughout the island and have reached over 675. Ideally, we wait until the chicks are older to band them with a single federal band. However, they are also harder to catch as they age. More mobile chicks will run deep into inland vegetation when they hear our approach.
Vegetation can typically provide good cover from predators; however, one plant in particular is a bit troublesome. Bindweed is an invasive that grows rapidly in dense clumps. It has the potential to entangle chicks in its snaring stems. I also noticed a trapped adult tern which needed to be untangled. Bindweed seems to restrict the ability of a tern to take of effectively, especially in response to predators. I saw a Peregrine Falcon easily grab an adult that was unable to flee rapidly after feeding chicks in bindweed.
While all of our original batch of nests have hatched, we are still noticing some latecomers lay new clutches of eggs. These nests tend to be low along the beach or in inventive spots such as piles of rocks inland. I also saw our first five egg nest last week, which is a rarity for Common Terns. This is likely due to multiple terns laying eggs in the same nest rather than five eggs from a single tern.
Rare five egg Common Tern nest
We are also receiving interesting data from our terns fitted with GPS transmitters. The map below shows the foraging movements of a single tern nesting in our colony.
Welcome back to our very foggy island! Early July has been wet but we are hopeful to see sunny skies for the next few weeks. As the midpoint of the season rolls around, the island is teeming with life! I felt like now is a good time to introduce all our young friends that are making work that much cuter!
Tern soup! Two young Common tern chicks waiting their turns to be measured.
A large portion of the work we do revolves around our Terns. This ranges from work with the adults to regular check-ins with chicks! Our 1st Tern chicks made their appearance on the 18th of June. I like to think of these freshly hatched chicks are “chicken nuggets”. As they get older, they go from nugget, to chunky, and finally to beautiful. We are hopeful to see our first tern chicks leave our island paradise in the next week or so!
A behaved Arctic tern chick posing with Devin.
While the main attraction of most visitors are the Puffins, I’d like to show y’all the real alcid cuties! Our Razorbill chick finally allowed us to capture and band it. These personally are my favorite chicks on these colonies. With pale yellow mouths and distinct whistle calls, they really have stolen my heart. Additionally, their bands are extremely unique. Where most bands are circular, Razorbill bands are triangular!
A young Razorbill showing off its yellowing mouth.
Another Top contender for cutest chick are the Black guillemots. While may be simple black fuzzballs, its their personality that makes them so perfect. I have never met a chick so eager to attack. From the day they are born, they will bite, hiss, and charge whoever dares invade their burrow. These cuties are a crew favorite to measure, as you will always have something silly happen in the process.
This Guillemot is not very happy about being measured…
And finally, the chicks you all have been waiting for… Puffins!!
Our plumpest puffin on the island, breaking the scales at 365 grams!
Even with all the species we look after, Puffins make everyone on the crew say “AWEEEEE”. Our puffin chicks are getting fed well, with lots of large Sandlance coming with our adults. Lovingly called “chunky muffins”, some of our productivity chicks are becoming hard to fit out of their burrows!
An adorable Atlantic puffin chick showing off its big feet!
It is safe to say our island is properly invaded by chicks of all shapes and sizes. In the next few weeks, we as a crew will see them grow and eventually fledge! While its sad to see them go, they bring a new generation of breeding birds to the gulf of Maine. Until then, we will savor every minute we get with these birds!
When I last wrote the sun was shining and tern chicks had started hatching. Really, what more could you ask for? Unfortunately, eggs continue hatching but the sun decided to go and take a weeks-plus long leave from us behind a veil of thick wet fog…
Since the fog set in we’ve been limited to the extent of work we can do as there has been too much moisture out on the grass to enter the colony. When chicks are small and downy, getting wet without a chance to dry out is the quickest way to a sad ending. At this stage they are unable to thermoregulate on their own so we aim to minimize disturbance around them when it’s wet and hope they have dedicated parents to endure a few bad days staying warm and dry when they can still be brooded.
Adult Arctic tern brooding a newly hatched chick while the larger ‘A’ chick cries out for food from the partner up above.
With the extent of poor weather we’ve had so far, the effects have already shown in losing a number of recently hatched chicks throughout the colony. To make matters worse on top of the fog, a steady rain set in today so the outlook doesn’t look too great for whenever we can get back out into the field again. I was part of one of the worst years on record for tern productivity across the Gulf of Maine in 2021 while on PMI which had similar poor weather and truly, I hope this season doesn’t continue to trend in the same direction. But as I was told on a phone call recently, “Mother Nature bats last and she always bats 1.000”, so really, things are outside our control.
Recently hatched tern chick awaiting its parents return to escape the chilly air.
One thing we have at least been able to minimally start doing is chick provisioning stints looking to record the diversity of prey species, size, and feeding rates at marked tern nests in select areas of the colony. Sitting in a blind for three-hour watches, each of us records every feed we see based on the type of prey item brought in, who receives the item, and how big the item is relative to the length of the adult’s bill.
So far this season we saw a large proportion of sand lance coming in during earlier stints amongst a rather diverse list of fish species as opposed to the desired hake and herring abundance we’d prefer to see. Thankfully though in recent days, herring, and some large ones at that, have started to make more of an appearance which could be better news for chick survival and growth development. Not all the prey brought in have been fish either as I had the joy of watching an adult common tern pick up and feed ants to its young nestling before eating a dozen itself. As you could imagine, tiny ants probably aren’t the best meal to have and the ‘B’ chick seemed to make that clear in its faint desire to take them. A couple nests over I had an adult Arctic tern return again and again with small insects, a few I happened to notice as the grasshoppers we’ve observed jumping around grassy areas by the hundreds.
Although some adults could be insect specialists, my guess is that some will do what they can during challenging times. Given my previous seabird experience, there also seems to be an increased level of aggression between adults maybe spurred on by the current conditions. During one provisioning watch, I witnessed over 25 kleptoparasitism events in the area in front of me including one at a nest I monitor that launched the small chick five feet into the air as an adult flew in and ripped at the dangling sand lance in its mouth it hadn’t fully swallowed yet. This isn’t the only account of seeing a chick being launched from similar encounters or nearby adults protecting their areas.
Foggy view from Ledge Blind during a morning provisioning watch.
Apart from the terns, we’ve been able to start nest checks and growth monitoring for black guillemots which surprised us with a few new chicks our first time out checking crevices we had marked at the start of June. Already being in cold, damp rocky crevices without the thick fog-collecting vegetation around them, this chicks should fare better in this weather even if the sun doesn’t consider making a return anytime soon.
It has been a minute since we’ve given a PMI update, so here we go! The reason for our lack of posting has been due to Solar issues on the island. As some may know, our electricity and internet come from an awesome solar set up. What wasn’t so awesome was when our solar had some parts break down, leaving us in the dark. But with the amazing people at Maine Coastal Islands, we have a generator to keep us going. And with our WiFi back up and running, lets check in on what the birds have been up to.
Island Census
As June rolls around, an island census is in order. With the help of some awesome volunteers and staff members, set out to count all the Tern, Eider, and Laughing gull nests on the island. We accomplish this by walking in a tight formation throughout the whole colony. This season is shaping up to be interesting. We found around 961 tern nests, and a handful of Common eider nests. This number is significantly lower then recent years, and brings a lot of questions as to why. Food seems to be a common theme, and most likely played a role in our lower numbers. We noticed in our Tern trapping efforts that adults body conditions were not the best. Birds were lighter then what we would expect, suggesting that food may not be as available in the surround waters. Additionally, early in the season, Butterfish were being brought back to the island rather then Hake, Herring, or Sandlance. These silver dollar looking fish look like a good meal, but cannot be swallowed by the terns.
Our wonderful cenus crew, all smiles for the foggy weather!
Tern Tagging
One of our goals this season with Tasha was to deploy tracking tags on terns. These tiny solar powered tags allow us to see where our terns are traveling. Additionally the type of tag we have deployed allows us to download the data without needing to recapture the birds multiple times, relieving a lot of stress on the terns. With the great effort of Maine Coastal staff and crew members, we have successfully deployed 8 Common tern and 4 Arctic tern tags.
Some incredible tracks of Common terns. They seem to mostly go north of the island to feed, but birds do have a mind of their own.
Some questions that are driving this tagging effort relate to food, movement, and climate change in the Gulf of Maine. Some of our first tracks are showing Arctic terns traveling as far as 125 Km and Common terns traveling upwards of 40 Km. this data is super interesting, and we will be sure to keep you all posted on any discoveries!
Chicks!
A fresh Black guillemot chick from the boardwalk.
On a much brighter note, we are starting to see chicks all over the place! Our first tern chicks were seen on the 18th! These cuties are shaped like fuzzy chicken nuggets, and always put moral at an all time high! Additionally, we have had our first Atlantic puffin, Razorbill chicks, and Black guillemot chicks as well! In the next few weeks, we should continue to see a rise in hatching, and will start to check up on our Pufflings (be prepared for more cuteness).
All smiles for the first tern chicks in our productivity plots!
Hopefully we will be back on the grid in the next week or so, and bring more regular blog posts with it. Feel free to comment any questions you have, or even anything in particular you want to hear more about. Cheers until then!
This is Aidan from Ship Island. We are excited to announce that our eggs have started hatching as of June 18th! In the last week, the colony has transformed from entirely eggs to mostly nests filled with newborn chicks. This means plenty of new tasks to keep us busy. We have started measuring chicks in our eight productivity plots and observing the food items that adults provision their chicks.
A Common Tern chick just emerging from its egg. It may appear ungainly at first, but it will soon have a thick coat of downy feathers. We avoid handling wet newborn chicks since they are more fragile in this stage.
The A chick (first chick born) with its downy feathers. Downy is a type of fluffy non-interlocking feather which provides insulation and protects the delicate chicks. Young chicks are born with only downy feathers until they start molting into flight and body feathers. The B chick in this photo is pipping (breaking out of the eggshell with its beak).
Common Tern chicks can be banded once they reach 24 hours old. Banding chicks at such a young age was a new experience for me. Interestingly, the legs of terns barely grow in diameter past their day 1-2 size. This means that there is no concern about them outgrowing their bands.
We also finished banding and putting out GPS transmitters on adult terns last week. This coincides with the time of chick hatching, so we do not disturb the provisioning efforts of the adults. We managed to catch a total of 52 adult Common Terns over one week.
An adult tern which we captured, banded, and measured.
We will have further updates as the chicks continue to grow and more nests hatch. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed the pictures.
Wednesday, June 21st marks the summer solstice, the day with the longest period of sunlight – or as I like to call it, the “longest day of the year.” And for me, it was a wonderful day here on Metinic Island.
For starters, the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and bright, a welcomed change from the rainy and foggy weather we had prior. The winds were calm and the seas were glassy. With my supply of clean socks running dangerously low, I took advantage of the sun and decided to do some laundry. There’s something about not having a washing machine that really makes you appreciate clean socks! After some scrubbing and rinsing, we ventured into the colony to do our daily nest checks. Both Common and Arctic Tern chicks are hatching now, and I’ve definitely caught a hint of baby bird fever. During our checks, we weigh, measure, and band the chicks starting when they are a mere day or two old. For those who are wondering, this is their prime cuteness stage. With their round bodies and disproportionately large heads, they are bundles of adorable, fluffy magic.
Herring Gull chick found in the forest of Metinic Island.
Terns aren’t the only chicks that have been making an appearance. We sometimes see recently hatched Spotted Sandpipers clambering about. They are even smaller than the tern chicks, something akin to a cotton ball with toothpicks for legs and little wisps of fluff where their tails should be. A few Herring Gulls in the forest are also hatching, but they are already quite large, some the size of footballs. Savannah Sparrows nestlings have begun leaving the nest, showing off their stubby fledgling tails as we flush them from the grass.
After oohing and aahing over baby birds all morning, we switched gears and focused the afternoon on Black Guillemots. We did a big sweep to look for nest burrows and eggs. The task of locating guillemot burrows is not a particularly easy one. The shoreline of Metinic can be rather dicy, as it is mostly steep, jagged rocks. The guillemots like to nest in the crevices, cavities, gaps, and ledges here. In just the right position, sometimes with body sprawled out over rocks and head turned upside down, you can get the right angle and see into their burrows. They usually lay one or two speckled eggs, which perfectly blend against the rocky background. Every now and then, I was treated to an up-close view of an incubating adult. It was slow-going, but we managed to locate just under 70 active burrows. As the season progresses, we will follow a subset of those to measure chick growth once they begin to hatch.
Common Tern chick photographed in its first few days of life.
When our tern and guillemot work was done for the day, the ocean looked too inviting to pass up. I waded into the shallows of North Cove and enjoyed a few minutes of icy water. When you live on an island with no running water, showers can be few and far between, so afterwards I treated myself to a warm shower. My clothes were clean, I was clean, the weather was great, baby birds were everywhere – the longest day of the year was turning out to be a pretty great one.
To make an already great day even better, I stepped outside that evening to enjoy the sunset. Just as the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, Ryan pointed out a whale in the distance. It breached, smacked its tail against the surface of the water a couple times (called “lobtailing”), then submerged itself again. Having only seen whales a few times, it was a pretty exciting moment for me. It was a downright awesome way to end the longest day of the year.
The past two weeks quickly became a blur for us as work became terns, terns, terns with some very long days.
With the birds finally settling in and laying more eggs day by day, our focus turned almost entirely on the tern colony. First off was setting up productivity plots to follow breeding success and chick growth rates for the season. This involved scouting out several tight clusters of nests on manageable terrain in order to follow 75 total sites before erecting a two-foot high fence around each plot to help contain the chicks once they hatch. The goal of the fence is to keep the chicks within the plot in an area where we can repeatedly find them without them running off intermingling with surrounding nests or dare we say trying to hide in the extra thick and prickly bull thistle nearby.
Once plots were set, the next task while there were still only eggs on the ground was trapping adult terns for mark/recapture metapopulation studies. We set out with a goal of catching 20 common terns and 40 Artic terns and after previous trapping woes on Petit Manan Island in 2021, I felt we’d be lucky to get to half that number.
Much to my surprise, we not only met our goal but even exceeded it with several days to spare before the first chicks were set to arrive! Trapping is one of the many love/hate events where you can finally get to see an adult bird up close but have to endure the sometimes painful waiting game of whether or not it is going to oblige by entering your trap and even if it does, happening to set it off. Even with our success, we all had plenty of the later.
Adult tern coyly landing in a bow net trap reluctant to set off the trigger strings.
There were many a moments watching terns stand on top of a treadle trap (walk-in enclosure) staring in or having a bird sit back on the wooden dummy eggs inside a bow net trap yet failing to trigger the strings because they weren’t tight enough. This is when your blood starts to pulse as you wait for what you hope is the second it finally jumps in or snags enough of the line before you can go retrieve it but on several occasions the bird never did and escaped our grasp by the end of the allotted time for its nest.
For all the trying times we did at least have those of success from instant catches minutes after setting a trap to the what I feel will be the infamous double bagger when I watched two adults sit down in side-by-side traps, both failing to set them off, each bird wiggling and wiggling around on the eggs for several minutes until BAM!, both traps popped shut simultaneously and it was a dash to make sure both birds were removed quickly before sending them to the processing popup.
Technician Mitchell on processing/banding duty during a trapping stint recording adult wing cord, mass, and bill-head measurements before applying avian identification bands for any unmarked birds.
It may sound like a lot, and you could even ask why we do it, but after quick analysis of the banded birds we captured, we likely had adult Arctic terns that was banded as chicks in 2001 and 2006 making them 17 and 22 years old! For a bird that can fly over 40,000 miles a year during its migration, it puts a whole new perspective to how incredible they are when you find out you have a bird nesting here still after traveling almost half a million miles with hopefully many more to go.
Adult Arctic tern gets a close up before being released post processing.
Rounding out our effort tracking terns, Friday marked our annual GOMSWG (Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group) census counting every tern nest here across the island. With the help of refuge staff Michael, Eddy, and Brian as we well as additional help from outreach intern Cynthia and Friends of Maine Coastal Islands board member Kate, we made quick work counting up the colony to document (drum roll…………) that there are approximately one more pair of nesting terns than last year’s record year!
With current calculations, the adjusted grand total sits at 1,227 tern nests (double that for number of adult birds) with an average clutch size of two eggs. Although we can revel in being part of a record-breaking year, surpassing last year’s 1,226 nests only by one doesn’t quite show significant growth but still shows positive signs as numbers remain stable even after the slow start this summer.
With that, we bid adieu as we await our first chicks to hatch… well, wrote that too soon… Mere hours later once winds subsided to do a quick productivity plot check, surprise surprise there were two common tern chicks that hatched during the yesterday’s storm! Thankfully warmer weather is forecast on the horizon as many more will surely be hatching right behind them.
Double rainbow over the rocky shore of Ship Island
This is Aidan with great news from the tern colony here on Ship Island. Our common terns reached their peak of incubating nests. This is the time when we conduct a yearly census to estimate the number of nests and eggs in the colony. A team of six people searched the colony on June 12th and concluded we had approximately 1394 nests! This is a new all-time high, surpassing last year’s record of 936 nests. It is super rewarding that all out hard work is paying off and the terns are prospering this year.
One of the rare four egg nests found during the GOMSWG census
We also commenced tern trapping efforts as well as tagged seven birds with GPS units. It is fascinating to observe how each pair of terns will react to the trap being placed overtop their nest. Some inexperienced terns are quite easy to catch and wander eagerly into the awaiting enclosure. Others are confused by the trap and pace the nest perimeter or sit atop the trap. A few more seasoned terns (perhaps those who encountered traps in the past) simply wait a good distance from the nest, unwilling to be fooled by the likes of us. After capturing a tern, we band the individual and promptly release it so it can return to its eggs.
Ship Island team and refuge biologists banding our first Common Terns
Since this is my first time working with terns, there are many surprises for me this season. The tenacity of these terns in defense of their nests is just astounding. Terns are more aggressive than gulls or any of the other seabirds I have worked with. They do not hesitate to constantly hit us on our heads and shower us in poop. While a few terns doing this at first seemed quite innocuous, it is quite a show when being screamed at by hundreds of terns. The terns being able to inflict injuries in defense of their precious eggs makes me respect them even more.
A group of Common Eiders with ducklings seen through a scope
Our other birds nesting on Ship or neighboring islands are also moving along in their nesting cycles. We are seeing small groups of Common Eiders with chicks gathering offshore. Eiders group together to raise chicks and better protect them. We are now seeing and hearing the tiny newborns of Song and Savannah Sparrows bunched together in their small grass nests. Half of our Mallard nests have also hatched, although they seem to have a knack for simply disappearing. It is amazing how well birds can hide their nests and young on such a small island.
Young Song Sparrows nestled within their grassy nest
We are expecting the first Common Tern eggs to hatch any day now. Hopefully, next time you hear from us we will have chicks!
Summer with the seabirds 