Telemetry

I wield the Yagi antenna like a fencer's foil, straight out in front, hopes high for a good signal, a blip of information that will dictate my next move. It beeps and I charge forward in the direction of the strongest signal. I am on top of a ridge above Portezuela (PZ) and the signal is pointing me down into a steep drainage filled with dense manzanita--a radio tracker's worst nightmare. Luckily, the signal is strong enough that I know the bird has to be close enough to me that I might not have to bushwack through too much stiff manzanita branches or scratchy chamise. I am looking for YGY/AP, a one-year old bird with a tiny radio transmitter backpack, a sneaky bird who we have not seen for nine days because he traverses the ridges and disappears to who-knows-where. I know that he is close because I can hear a bird pecking at bark on a branch. I drop to my hands and knees, unplug the antenna from the receiver so I don't rip it out (they are much too fragile for the vegetation we plow through every day), and crawl under a dried out manzanita trunk, crunchy leaf duff filling my boots and chamise brushing my hat back on my head, scratching my face. Through the tangle of the smooth, maroon, peely manzanita branches, I can see a pair of jay feet and the flash of yellow and green. That's my bird! I get a little closer to make sure it is, in fact, YGY/AP and start my timer. I watch him forage in the duff for five minutes, take a GPS point, and clamor out of the drainage back up to the road on the ridge. One bird down, eight to go, times two. It is the beginning of an epic day in the field.

Transmitter/antenna.

Last fall, twenty hatch year (HY) birds (born spring 2012) were trapped, banded, and fitted with dime-sized transmitters that have a six-inch long antenna sticking out. Our job this spring is to find these birds every day until we have at least 30 separate GPS points on each one. This data will help the "bosses" determine where young birds go
when they disperse from their birth territory. All hatch year birds (after January 1st they are called Second Years, SY) have to travel away from their natal territories to be able to establish their own territories in suitable habitat. SY birds don't always find a mate and establish a territory right away, so this data will help us have a better idea of where these birds are spending their time in that first year and in what habitat. We record who the bird is interacting with and in what way (pair behavior like joint perching and bobbing, territorial behavior like aggressiveness, and foraging behavior within a certain radius) for five minutes of when we first detect them.

This winter was particularly harsh on the jays so only nine of the twenty transmitter birds remain.  Six birds died--we found their transmitters near a scatter of ratty blue feathers. One bird disappeared completely--we never found a signal. Five birds dropped their transmitters--we found their transmitters dangling in thick brush or on the ground with broken straps. Luckily, one of these birds seems to have established a territory at the top of the Red Neck Bowl in PZ and we find him almost every day we track. He is exhibiting paired behavior with another one of our transmitter birds, which is pretty exciting.

Back to the big day. I wanted to get every bird twice, and YGY/AP three times, which meant I needed to be in the field for at least six hours because we have to wait at least three hours in between GPS points. I started high on the ridge and got points on YGY/AP and UGW/AP, then hiked down the steep crumbly old road to pick up the birds in the valley below. I found WYB/AP and OYB/AP on foraging on top of a small oak-covered ridge. I found OUK/AP foraging low in the oaks where she always is in No Man's Land. This time, though, the oaks were dripping with the liquid lemony song of Nashville Warblers so I stopped for ten minutes to soak that up and get a glimpse of the sneaky migrants hiding in the tippy-top of scrub oak leaves. Then I hauled up to the top of the Red Neck Bowl to look for RYP/AP and her man WBO/AP. I'm not sure why exactly, but I have a fondness for RYP/AP. There are just some birds that you look at and they are more than just a bird. They make your heart feel mushy. She is like a small child that I get to watch grow up and hopefully flourish in this insane world. I feel proud of her when she catches a moth out of mid-air. Weird, right? She was foraging by herself and WBO/AP was nowhere to be found. He is the bird that dropped his transmitter, so we get points on him by luck only (but we have more points on him that a few other birds who are just really, really hard to find sometimes).

At this point, I had points on all the "easy" valley birds and had almost two hours to go until I could get another GPS point on YGY/AP, so I went after BGB/AP--the ghost bird. He disappears up a deep canyon most days but sometimes he shows up randomly right in front of your face when you aren't even looking for him. The first week of tracking, we spent hours each day getting frustrated by his ghostliness. Then one day I was walking down from tracking in the Red Neck Bowl and I heard the jingling of bands scuffling around in the dead leaves below a scrub oak. I snuck into the foliage to get a better look and there was BGB/AP, the first time we saw him all season! I found him without even using a receiver!! I could barely contain my excitement. Today I hiked to the top of a high ridge and pointed my antenna in the direction of his Bermuda Triangle drainage. Nothing. No signal. I wandered further and tried again. Nothing. No signal...until all of a sudden I saw a bird rise above a distant ridge and the signal went from nothing to a loud blip. I ran. No joke, I booked it through a grassy field and then up and down a rocky ridge along an old sheep fence. I ran--equipment jostling around me, tripping over my own toes--for almost 1/3 of a mile without stopping because I wanted this bird bad. After all that, the bird I saw rise above the ridge wasn't him and I spent the better part of an hour trying to locate him, but I never did.

BGB/AP on one of the days I did get him. Note the antenna sticking out near his tail.

I had to get back up to the top of the ridge to find YGY/AP again, so I raced back up there and then back down again to get the valley birds in round two for the day. Luckily, they were all in similar places so it only took an hour or so to get them all. WBO/AP was back in his territory foraging with RYP/AP. The only bird that gave me trouble was OYB/AP, who lead me on a steep chase down a grassy hillside dense with low scrub oaks, so I was sliding on my butt and breaking branches with my face trying to follow her. Then her signal disappeared. I gave up on her until later and then found her foraging alone exactly where I had started to track her over an hour earlier. Tracking something with wings is really interesting because they can just take off whenever they feel like it and there is nothing you can do about it.

After I got all the valley birds a second time, I hiked back up to the top of the ridge to get YGY/AP a third time and got back to the truck at 2:30pm. Due to a combination of the heat (easily in the 80s with little breeze), the duration (almost 8 hours of straight hiking), the distance, and the topography, I decided it was the most strenuous day of field work I have ever done. The best part was that I could have stopped after getting one point on each bird and headed home feeling accomplished, but I was so naturally jacked up on dopamine that I felt like I was on top of the world, invincible. Tracking is like an exciting treasure hunt, except your "treasure" is mobile. It is so thrilling to finally find the bird you are looking for. I just didn't want to stop! It did feel pretty amazing, though, when I drove home and jumped in an ice cold shower. It was a beautiful afternoon, so the four of us on the crew hung out on the porch sipping Bourbon as the sun dipped below the ridge where I had started my morning. Ish'p'oy.

On top of the ridge with my antenna.

Visitors from the North

Living on an isolated island has its social quirks--here you are either spending almost every hour of every day with the same three people, or meeting new folks who only stick around for a day or two, or you are on top of a ridge alone and you know there is not another human in miles. I like it like this. When familiar faces come visit for a few hours or days, it is a beautiful mix of the excitement of sharing this place with them and the relaxed comfort of being in the company of cherished family and treasured friends. My aunt, uncle, and cousin came out for a day trip to visit on the same boat that my friend Lara came out to stay the night. It was fantastic to see them all. Marshall, Jennifer, and Nathaniel got to see a part of my life that many of my family members only get to hear about through the email grapevine and I am very happy they did.

From Inverness to Santa Cruz Island, family on the porch! Nathaniel, Me, Jennifer, and Marshall.

We had lunch at the Cabins, walked through the Field Station plot and then wandered the beach at Prisoner's looking for heart shaped rocks. They got to experience the full "Jurassic Park"-like experience of driving in the Miner, our field Land Cruiser, from the coast to the central valley and back through the only slightly flowing creekbed and past Giant Coreopsis, juicy poison oak, and the island oaks, ceanothus, and lemonadeberry. They met Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, and Bart Stupak, as well as Castro and Dalia, who were all bickering in the Cabin Oak tree.

Feeding Hillary Clinton a peanut.

After we dropped them off at the harbor, Lara and I headed back to the Cabins to continue the adventures. We wandered above the valley on Islay Canyon, where Lara saw her first Island Fox in the Manzanita. Later we made stir-fry, played Eucre with my crew, played guitar and sang on the heli-pad, and watched the stars. The next day we adventured some more before I drove her to the boat. So wonderful to have such a great friend come out to play!

Love this human.

Jumping over the Red-White Divide

See this old post from 2011 to learn about Island Geology and the Red-White Divide.

See the fox ears? He was following us.

This cutie sat 15 meters from us and even crept closer to inspect us.

Giant Grasshopper!

Coches Beach.

Driving the Kiwi ProHunt truck. It is very weird to drive on the right side (wrong side?) of the car.

Thanks for coming to visit!

A Year of Islands

It is my job to crawl-climb up north-facing slopes dense with scrub oak, ceanothus, and manzanita. I believe this means I am a professional bushwhacker. It is my job to explore emerald fairy glens draped in cucumber vines and bejeweled with island nightshade. I am a professional discoverer. It is my job to lounge in whispering golden hillsides dotted with lupine and mustard, bursting with meadowlark song and the bright blue sky. I am a professional lounger. It is my job to simply open my eyes and contemplate the iridescent blue of the Island Scrub Jay's feathers as it changes in sunlight and shadow. I am awestruck by profession.

Sirius, a male Scrub Jay in Coches Prietos Canyon.

Another year, another island. I am back on Santa Cruz Island for the spring field season studying the Island Scrub Jay--three months of absolute bliss, of hardworking, sweat-drenched, well-earned happiness in paradise.

Two years ago, I made a split-second decision that turned out to be one of the best choices I have ever made--leave college and work out on this rugged island for three months studying a bird I hardly even knew existed (or at least differed from its mainland counterpart, the Western Scrub Jay). Today, not too much further down the "academic" path but leaps and bounds further in my life wanderings, I find myself in exactly the right place again.

Looking North towards Picacho Diablo over the thickening blanket of fog in Portezuela.

Camera Blues

Bad news, folks. I dropped my camera two weeks ago and it broke. Ouch. Worst time and place to lose photo-taking abilities. I can still take photos but you can see the side of the lens in most of them and the image stabilization function is, well, non-functioning the majority of the time. This unfortunate technology set-back compounded with the "I've-been-in-the-field-ALL-day" delirium makes blogging in a coherent way nearly impossible. Unless you are Luke, whose blog Boom Chachalaca is kept up and pretty awesome (he has a fancy camera and a good eye). Also, check out the Los Farallones blog.

I wish blogging were my thing right now, but it is not. This is not the end of it all, nowhere near, but I do expect to post less frequently until I get motivated to get into a regular groove.

Here are some pre-camera-bounce photos and a few post-camera-bounce to demonstrate what my current photographing abilities are.

Adult male Anna's Hummingbird in the mist-net. We caught four on my birthday!

Another male Anna's Hummingbird...less iridescent feathers!

Lifer Grasshopper Sparrow.

A mildly socked-in day.

Horned Puffin! A life bird for all that saw it.

Arboreal Salamander in a crack.

Rusty Blackbird dancing manakin style.

Harbor Seal being so damn cute.

Northern Saw-whet Owl

Banding the Saw-whet Owl, broken camera.

A Barn Owl! I've held many dead Barn Owls, but never a live one until it got caught in our net. We banded it. Amazing.

My very sad camera attempting to photograph the Barn Owl in the tree. Artsy squiggles.

Cuddle-puddle of Mirounga

Young Elephant Seals snoozing in Sewer Gulch at low tide.

The Elephant Seal (in the genus Mirounga) is a bizarre and awesome creature. Their weird noises bubble up from the gulches around the island--their squabbling roar is a combination between a rocket-launch fart and someone gagging and vomiting. Sounds gross, but it's really quite endearing. Most of the time they just sleep and snore. When you sneak up on them, they look up at you with these big, sad, baby eyes.

What Exactly Am I Doing Here?

I realized that my last post never even mentioned what I am doing on the Farallones. I am a volunteer field intern for PRBO's Southeast Farallon Island Project. PRBO has been out here studying wildlife in some capacity since 1968, so I am essentially just gathering data to add to their long-term dataset. In the Winter (December to March-ish) the project focuses on Pinnapeds (seals and sea lions), in the Spring/Summer (March to August) the project monitors breeding seabirds, and in the Fall (August to December), the current season, the project focuses on migrating songbirds and White Sharks (known to most as Great White Sharks). These projects monitor long-term population trends as well as explore the ecosystem's response to climate change.

Red-breasted Nuthatch grabs a grub from a crack in the "sidewalk" at the lighthouse.

In the Fall, the crew of 5-6 people methodically scour the 95-acre island for birds everyday and conduct a variety of surveys to monitor other island dwellers and visitors. We mist-net and band as many birds as we can catch when the weather is good which allows us to keep track of birds that stick around for more than a day or two. We also conduct 10 hours of "Shark Watch" in 2-hour long shifts at the Lighthouse to scan for attacks.

The schedule for the beginning of October. Descriptions of jobs below.

 Dinner is a very important job. One person cooks and cleans each night and we sit down family-style to enjoy the meal together. This is great because when you get in from a long day in the field, it is really nice not to have to plan a meal and clean up after yourself. Depending on how many people are on the island, you end up cooking about once a week. We eat well out here. Incredibly well, in fact. The Farallon Fifteen is real.

A.M. Seawatch is a 5 minute count of passing seabirds (shearwaters, fulmars, loons, etc) done with a telescope.

A.M. A.S. means Morning Area Search. This is a 1.5-2 hour bird search of the entire island. The island is broken up into 5 areas and one person walks the entirety of the accessible land looking for new birds and re-sighting birds with bands.

BATS is a scan of each of the three trees on the island and of the lighthouse for bats. We have had 3 Hoary Bats this season, two of which were before my arrival.

SHOR means Shorebird count. One person walks the edge of the island counting shorebirds at high tide.

P.M. A.S. is the Afternoon Area Search, done exactly like the AM Area Search.

GULLS is an all island count of roosting gulls. Western Gulls are the most abundant; there is a smattering of California Gulls, and occasionally another species or two that are hanging out.

P.M. Seawatch is a series of six 5-minute seawatches in the evening, facing the opposite direction of the A.M. Sea watch for better lighting.

COLOR means one person spends 2 hours searching the island for color-banded birds (see BAND below).

BUOW is the Burrowing Owl assistant for the night, who stays up with Maggie, the Burrowing Owl intern, to help her band the owls and take photographs to help age and sex the birds. They usually get to sleep in the next day.

E-SEAL is a search for tags on Elephant Seals every 3rd day at low tide, when the seals are hauled out in the coves and gulches.

BAND is the person who is in charge of running nets and banding birds all day. We band all birds we catch with a lightweight aluminum band on their right or left leg depending on the day (left on odd numbered days, right on even days), and we band six of the more abundant species with plastic color bands so we can keep better track of how many there are and how long they stay (see COLOR above).

Shark Watch is a constant scanning of the waters surrounding the island for shark attacks, whales, and boaters.

Last but not least, DATA. This person is in charge of entering data when there is time in the day. This job definitely depends on the day---on a busy day with lots of birds, data is the lowest thing on the list and will most likely not get done.

This busy busy schedule basically has everyone running around all the time on a birdy day, helping each other out and seeing lots of cool natural events unfold while taking notes and keeping lists. On slower days, we get to take a breather and enjoy the island life.

Banding a Burrowing Owl on my Birthday.

Western Palm Warbler after I banded it.

Male Varied Thrush taking a break.

Mmm, Sunrise.

Farallones: Arrival

I am here! I actually live on Southeast Farallon Island (SEFI from now on). A sailboat dropped me off and wont be back for two weeks. I'll be here for eight weeks without leaving the island and after one full day of work, I am incredibly excited for my time here. I have already learned a ton and add so much more knowledge into my brain every day, about birds, whales, sharks, people, seals and sea lions, fish, etc!

I live in the house on the far left, called the PRBO house. Next to it is the Fish and Wildlife Service house. On the far right is the Powerhouse.

I left home on Friday to do the food shop for the resupply. We had a giant list to get at local Green String Farm and Safeway. It took three hours, four shopping carts, and almost a thousand dollars. We (being myself and Sophie Webb, the other biologist who came out on this food run) drove back to PRBO's Petaluma Headquarters, packed the items in Action Packers and buckets, and packed the PRBO Farallon van with the goods and our personal gear. We slept on the couches at the headquarters and woke up bright and early (meaning dark and early) at 4 AM. We left the office at 5, arrived at the boat at 6, and were sailing under the Golden Gate bridge at 7 in the 66' sailboat named Gundamain, which means "Home at Sea" in aboriginal australian! The ride was calm and foggy so it was pretty uneventful, but the people were nice and interesting to talk to and the boat itself was lush and spotless.

The food.

The Gundamain.

Sailing out of Sausalito Harbor at 7am.

City Skyline with fog.

As we arrived at the Farallones, the fog lifted and the hot sun beat down. Jim, my new boss, zoomed out to meet us in the Zodiac (inflatable boat) and start unloading the food and our gear. Then it was our turn. To get onto the island, we must attach the Zodiac to a large crane that pulls us up out of the swell and onto a large concrete pad. This set-up is known as East Landing. There is another small hand-cranked crane on the North side of the island in the area called (appropriately) North Landing. More about these places in another post (an upcoming history post!). Once I set foot on the island, it hit me that I would not be stepping off the island for two whole months!

East Landing crane with the Zodiac.

The view of the North side of the island; Most of these rocks are inaccessible, but covered in sea birds.

The view from the top of the lighthouse.

It took a day or two to feel settled, but now my segment of the field season is in full swing! More about my duties in the next post.