We started the day with a roundabout session of microscopic organisms, games and other activities. Ram interviewed students for video postcard to send to our friends in the Commander Islands. They told us what they do for fun and what they like and don’t like about living on St. Paul Island. Kristen and Orlin came back today to share more about their TWIG seabird telemetry project and shoe off the tracking data collected yesterday.
Our young scientists ran next ran eggsperiments using the murre and gull eggs that they crafted earlier in the week. They discovered all the special properties of each egg shape.
Campers had a chance to make three different craft items today: Murre pop up cards, felt puffins, seabird tiaras. We also finished up the last of the beautiful pysanky eggs. A great (and busy) day for crafters!
We all found out just how hard it is to be an incubating murre. For each relay race, murre pairs had to exchange eggs between foraging expeditions 4 times without letting their egg roll off their feet. The big, bright paper mache murre eggs were so hard to contain! As soon as they touched the ground a hungry fox would dash in and eat them.
In the epic battle of Puffin vs. Murre everyone learned the fun lesson of seabird energetic trade-offs. Murres dive deeper and catch larger, more valuable fish (or candy in this case)—but only one at a time. Puffins have shallow dives for small fish, but can carry several in their beaks. In this relay contest, the puffin foraging strategy usually prevailed.
The Grub Hub surveys turned out to be almost too popular, with each kid wanting a chance to check a crevice nest to see what’s inside. For our final check the kids pulled out 6 fluffy chicks for a reproductive success rate of 38%. We agreed that this is slightly below the expected rate for crevice nesters.
The final hurrah was the giant murre egg pinata. Every kid got a whack at it before the candy all spilled out and huge puppy pile formed. The beautiful egg is no more, but the smashing was a great end to our Eggsellent Adventure!
