Third Day of Camp

Today was action-packed. Till, Bianca and Maurice get the early-bird award for waking up this morning in the rain. We headed over to Zapani and found new places for the five least auklet nest-boxes that had been tossed out of the rocks in the winter storm.

The afternoon was all about Refuge Monitoring.

Jason and McKenna came in and gave a great introductory talk about what the Refuge does on St. George Island, and how important St. George is for breeding seabirds. We learnt about productivity, population, and survival monitoring, and what these data can tell us about the marine environment.

We then all headed out to the cliffs. Our first stop was down at the old dock for some species identification. We saw parakeet auklets, least auklets, both horned and tufted puffins, red-faced cormorants, and red and black-legged kittiwakes. The sun came out, and there were lots of birds around.

We then hiked to a near-by cliff and, using a printed photo of the cliff, learnt how to set-up a productivity and population plot for red-legged kittiwakes. We learnt how to identify and number nests and then record the presence and absence of birds at each nest. No eggs yet, but we saw some copulations, and some fighting over nests. THANK YOU Jason and McKenna, we all learnt a lot.

Back at school we all decorated our own Seabird Camp 2016 t-shirts.