Seabird Camp Day 2
Today was so much fun! We explored what the sensational seabirds of St. Paul eat. First, we took a big picture view of bird beaks and how many are adapted for capturing and consuming specific types of food. Kendra shared a variety of model bird skulls with us. The hummingbird was SO tiny! We had a fast-paced relay race using different beaks to collect different prey then discussed seabird diets and beaks specifically, chasing bubbles to get a sense for what it’s like to be an auklet swimming in a swam of zooplankton.
To dive into more detail on who eats what we matched the seabirds in our field ID guides to their diets, building out their pages with some life history information. Then we collected some field sampling gear and headed to the harbor to see what types of zooplankton can be found in our backyard. Kayden, an intern through the concurrent Leadership camp and Seabird Camp alum, shared with us the importance of zooplankton to the ocean food web and the concern about harmful algal blooms in recent years due to warmer ocean temperatures. After grabbing life vests from the harbormaster, we used the dock to access deeper water and tried our hand at the same sampling method used to monitor harmful algal blooms species. We were stunned by how immediately we saw so much life in our samples! We flushed the specimens into our collection containers, concentrated the samples, then rushed back to the science room to see what we had captured. We had already seen that the Qagayax (red-legged kittiwake) group had captured two somethings that were zipping around.
Using a dissecting scope we discovered that we had caught two euphausiids and a lot of other small zooplankton and phytoplankton. The harbor is teaming with life! We continued to explore the samples while we spent the remaining hour of camp starting a couple projects. Roles are assigned for Friday’s play performance and rehearsals have commenced. We also started work on seabird diet mobiles. We can’t wait to share our work with our friends and family at the end of the week. We are very much enjoying the learning and creativity involved that are going into them.
