High gear, engaged

Alright so field work has officially kicked into high gear, so updates will be slow in coming and less detailed unfortunately :(
The day after the last post about banding, we went back to the same field to try and get more bobolinks, but no luck. We caught some more savannah sparrows, including ones we had already banded (one guy a total of three times over the two days - poor bugger) but that's it. I did get to do my first extraction though, on a savannah sparrow that was very cleanly caught and so was a good beginner one. I had no problems in handling the bird, but the physics of the mist net itself are tricky. When you think you need to move it one way to free a wing, it ends up having to go the opposite way. The fine string also loses itself in the feathers so you have to blow on the bird every so often to expose it again. Joe was very helpful in giving me tips on what to tackle first and how to move the string. One thing I would never have done without his advice was to put my thumb on the end of the sparrow's bill while trying to free its head. It seems counter-intuitive as it blocked my vision a bit and I had to navigate the string around my thumb now. However, as I was pulling the string over the bird's head I took my thumb away, and the head immediately drooped backwards, making it impossible to move the string off. Bird's necks are very flexible, and if I didn't leave my thumb there, its head just moved around with the string and I would never have gotten it free.
Since then, I've been out doing counts every morning. Of interest this week: an Upland Sandpiper, which aren't that common, stalking around a corn field. Lifer for me. Also some eastern bluebirds, which were also lifers for me.

Eastern Bluebird

Upland Sandpiper - not what I expected in an agricultural field

Also some pretty sunrises:

 Even with the hydro lines.

Same site, different morning.

And probably the most interesting thing was turning a corner and seeing this on the road:

My brain: cat? dead cat?! mobile rock?!! OH.

That's a snapping turtle, and it's the biggest turtle I've ever personally seen, but I don't think she was necessarily big for the species. Hard to give a scale, as I was not about to stick my head close enough to be in the picture, but if you look closely you can see tire tread marks on the gravel, and extrapolate from the width of a tire to how big this mama must be. I say mama because it's most likely that she is a female in search of a spot to lay her eggs, as that's usually the only reason they leave the water. They like to lay in gravelly areas, so hopefully she didn't just lay them on the road.

Although I think she'll lay eggs wherever she damn well wants to.

I dithered around trying to decide whether I wanted to risk my fingers in an attempt to move her off the road - I didn't. The road she was on was a quiet back road, and there was plenty of room for people to go around her. I have since learned that to move them, you should get them to bite down on a branch then use it to pull them off the road. Or if you want to do it Moragh-Jang-style, use a rope to haul them off. Not sure how you attach a rope without getting chomped but she does it.

After counts, I've been meeting up with Kristen and sometimes Joe in the afternoon to help out wherever I can with Kristen's project. She has a lot on her plate, and her field assistant is away in Guelph for this week, so I'm trying to make it a bit easier on her. I am getting good netting experience out of it as well as some human company :D. She snapped this one of me on the Tuesday, from the previous post:

Squeeee I'm a real birder now :3

I spent one afternoon/evening (it might have been two days ago, or four, I have no idea any more) helping Kristen count bug samples. On all her fields she has a series of cups planted in the ground with a water/soap mixture in the bottom, and once a week she collects what's in the cups, to eventually be able to say something about how haying affects what bugs are available for the birds to eat. Every cup has to be gone through, and every bug identified to an order or other taxonomic group, and counted. I'm not squeamish about stuff like that generally, but I will admit that I am not very fond of the smell of these samples. Some of them have had small frogs get trapped, or even mice, and they've been rotting in the field for a week. Slugs are the worst - they make everything like a goopy mass. But it's gotta be done, and I would never want her to have to do it all by herself all the time. We put on movies and tv shows in the background for entertainment - that day was Modern Family, The Office, Willow, and Mars Attacks. It was a pretty enjoyable time, except for my last sample, which had a total of 715 isopods in it (sow bugs). That was just tedious lol.

So picture these guys. Only times 51. And rotting. You're welcome.

Yesterday, we tried netting at another farm where they've been having trouble getting any bobolinks to tag, and unfortunately we weren't any more successful :( we had the net up for three hours and only caught one song sparrow and one black-capped chickadee. Chickadees have a bad habit of pumping their feet open and closed when they get caught, which makes them incredibly tangled. But Joe is an expert so we got her out no problem. After we furled the nets, Kristen and I tried some radio telemetry to see if we could locate the bobolinks that have already been tagged. It's so frustrating. The receiver is a $12,000 piece of equipment, and she has never been able to detect a bird more than 200m away; less if they're deep in the grass or behind trees etc. The idea behind tagging them was to figure out where they go after a hay field is mown, but they could fly kilometers, and the only way to try and track them is to drive the surrounding roads with the antenna mounted on the truck, or what we did yesterday, which was her driving and me holding it out the window. When fields are routinely upwards of 20 acres, only being able to detect a bird to 200m is as good as useless for finding them. We could find 3 of 5, but that's because those three were right on her field, right in front of us. God only knows where the others flew to, but hopes aren't high for finding them.

The Devil. Despair sold separately. Blood, sweat, and tears not included. 

She didn't need my help in the field this afternoon, but I might go count bugs again tonight; waiting on her word. I really hope her telemetry went better today :(.

Forever a birdnerd, and still loving field work,
Sarah

Banding adventures, part 1.

Tuesday, June 7: Today, I was vehicle-less, and so unable to do point counts. This sounds unfortunate but really was fortuitous, as it enabled me to help out with the mist netting and banding, which was a fantastic and valuable experience to have under my belt, besides being a lot of fun. So Kristen and Allison picked me up at 5 am and we drove out to Little Britain to the same hay field as yesterday, where we didn't net any bobolinks in the evening. Joe arrived just after us, around 630 am, and we unfurled the mist nets and started the waiting game. For those of you unfamiliar with mist netting (everyone? I sure was), this is what it looks like:

Fancy.

Essentially, they're 12m long, tall, fine-meshed volleyball nets, with the net hanging in a series of four pouches. Also significantly more expensive than a volleyball net, I'd imagine. The idea is that the bird can't really see it, and so flies into it and drops into one of the pouch parts and gets snagged there until we come and untangle it. Sounds a bit stressful on the bird, but it's really not so bad - the netting is so fine and light that they're very gently suspended. They do have the potential to thrash and get pretty tangled, but Joe is skilled at getting them out quickly so that was kept to a minimum. Also, whenever we see something get caught, the general reaction is a mad sprint to the net in case it manages to free itself and escape, so birds are never left in the net for any length of time.

The bobolinks stayed alert and un-caught for the first couple of hours, although we did snag some savannah sparrows and a song sparrow, as their flight is generally quick and dart-y, so they have less time to see the net and react. We band everything we catch, not just bobolinks. Savannah sparrows are tiny, relatively calm, and easy to deal with. The song sparrow we got was significantly feistier, doing its best to inflict mortal injury upon Joe. I think it forgets how very small it is, but it did give its best shot, and their bites aren't entirely painless.

After the couple of hours went by without bobolinks, Joe devised a plan: hack off a branch, and plant it like a shrub, to give them something to sit on close to the net and therefore increase the chances of them flying into it. That really did work; within a few minutes there was a male sitting on it to sing, and twenty minutes or so after that we got our first bobolink in the net :D

Hello handsome - being held in photographer's grip by Joe

He wasn't very pleased with being banded, and even less so with the application of the radio tag, as that involves clipping some of his back feathers and gluing the tag on. 

Finished tag application.

In total, we got three male bobolinks, and one female. Getting the female was exciting and important, as we can track her in order to find out where she is nesting and better evaluate the timing and effect of the hay harvest.

Beauty.

Besides bobolinks, our total came to three savannah sparrows, one song sparrow, and one very spunky red-winged blackbird. He drew blood from Joe with both claws and beak, and chomped Kristen as well. But he was gorgeous.

Showing off his colours.

There are many more pictures of today, which would be tedious to upload one by one onto this blog, but which you can see by following this link: Banding Adventures, part 1

We're going back tomorrow morning to see if we can get some more! I'll update with pics of that as soon as I can :) 

Sarah

HOLA, Escape-ades, mosquitoes.

Friday, June 3: Counts, counts, more counts. Weather was cooperative today so I got a full stint of dawn-10 am in. Yay! I say cooperative, in terms of precipitation and wind, but I by no means say it was pleasant. In contrast to the start of the week, the temperature when I started counts was only about 8 degrees Celsius. I brought mittens. I heard my first Vesper Sparrow, which was a relief because I had started to worry that I was simply not hearing them, or not correctly identifying them when I did hear them. Back in May before I had started counts, I would always confuse their song with a Song Sparrow, so I thought I might be doing that in the field. However, now that I'm in the groove of point counts and have trained my ears day after day, I can't imagine how I ever confused the two of them. They now sound completely different to me :D so I haven't been missing the Vespers. Also on the interesting bird list: horned larks!! I hadn't heard any at all yet, and wasn't sure if they were common or rare in this area, so when I heard their distinctive tinkling song from the field, I at first doubted my ears.Then it came again and again, and as you'll hear if you follow this link, there's really no way to mistake them for anything else.  http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Horned_Lark/sounds
This day I heard three in total, in two different fields. I was excited that they were around, as they're something I was hoping to see; a) because I really love their song - sounds like glass falling or something -  and b) they're just so neat-looking with their little feather horns and c) their code is HOLA which makes me feel gangsta.

HOLA at ya, bro.

Saturday, June 4: Argh, rain. Drove around site to site hoping the rain would stop before I reached the next one, until I got to the end of my count territory, after which I parked and read more Sherlock Holmes on my Kobo :D. First count today wasn't until 7:25, wail. The first four I did backed onto the 401, which presented an interesting noise problem; sort of a dull roar underneath all the bird song for the whole count. We'll see if those sites are consistently lacking a species or two and blame it on the traffic. A nice man from CAA with a tow truck stopped to see if I needed assistance. I'm doing my best to look official, with my binoculars and clipboard, but apparently I'm still giving off a damsel-in-distress vibe. The thrill-of-the-day was very nearly getting the Escape stuck on a road which would be better described as the Ravenous Rocky Ravine - ravenous because it wanted to devour my vehicle whole. The story is this: I was looking for a replacement intensive agriculture site, as one of mine is being left fallow this year, and so I deliberately turned left one road too soon on my way to another site, to see if I could scout out something on the way. Well, to the right I could see this road was lovely and paved, but trees blocked my view to the left. When I turned left, this is what I saw: 

Not pictured: paved road.

Except I was at the top, heading down. I hit the brakes, but I continued to skid down another couple of meters, coming to rest with a big pine tree on my right. I didn't really know what to do. There was no way in hell I was reversing out of there, and there was no way to move forward without one of the gully-like ruts irreversibly swallowing my tires. With more fear than logic, I decided to turn around and drive out. That's right, make a point turn right there in the middle of the RRR. With a pine blocking my way to the right. Well, clearly I made it out ok, but it took about ten minutes of inching forward and backward and trying not to yell too loud when I bounced in and out of the ruts in the process. My attitude towards the roads in Northumberland County is not getting any more positive.

Sunday, June 5: I took my camera out this day to capture what a typical day is like for me. You can see those pictures here: Day in the Life, June 2011

Monday, June 6: Counts. Of course. I was going to what we call "targeted" sites - little patches of rare habitat like prairie and savanna, usually tucked away somewhere obscure. My first site was under the hydro lines, and I ran into an unexpected problem: I could barely hear the birds over the SHEEP at the neighbouring farm. 

Problem? U mad?

These sites were the more beautiful places I get to go, as they're more natural habitats and usually pretty isolated. The birds tend to come much closer and there was very little traffic noise, if any. I even saw a monarch butterfly for the first time. However, these sites do have one down-side, when I have to remain still and concentrated for a full five minutes: 

Ignoring them isn't really an option.

Needless to say, I shower in bug spray repeatedly. Mmm, love the taste of DEET in the morning.

After counts, I came home, napped, had lunch, then headed out to Little Britain to meet Kristen, Joe, and Kristen's field assistant Allison at a hay field, of which half had been mown as part of Kristen's experiment, and half was to be mown in the next ten days. It's crucial that we catch and radio-tag any bobolinks on the territory now, as she wants to evaluate what they do and where they go when their habitat is cut down. So we set up three mist nets in the field around 4:00 pm and waited...and waited...but the problem when trying to catch bobolinks is that their flight is pretty slow, unless they're engaged in a chase, and so they had plenty of time to see the net and avoid it ><. We did catch and band a savannah sparrow, so it wasn't entirely uneventful. We also flushed a wild turkey hen who was sitting on her nine eggs - she exploded up about two feet from Joe and gave us all heart attacks. We packed it up around 6:45, with plans to reconvene and try again in the morning at 6 am. I returned the Escape (after cleaning up the mosquito carnage on the inside of the windows), and went home and crashed.

Stay tuned - next post devoted to Tuesday's banding adventures :D

Sarah

Cavalier

The title of this one is my current favourite word. Or at least the word that has been rocketing around in my brain for the last two weeks. Joe said Kristen and I were being rather cavalier about the whole "Rapture" business (did I mention he didn't know anything about it until the Friday right before?), and it's been lurking around my synapses ever since. Cavalier. It just sounds so...old-timey and brave. Then I heard it on the radio, in a Hedley song called Old School:

So why don't you meet me down behind the old school, we'll waste away the weekend with perfect regard for how cavalier we used to be, that beautiful insanity...

It's no Whitman or Yeats, but the song's catchy.  Anyway, I'm way off topic for this blog! There is a segue: the last three days have presented many challenges, and I adopted a fairly cavalier attitude towards them as a way of dealing, and I must say the results have been pretty good. Mostly because there wasn't anything I could do anyway, but that's beside the point :P

Tuesday, May 31: also known as The Huminferno. It was sunny and hot, and with the incredible 91% humidity, temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius. I must say early morning point counts were most pleasant, as the air was still and warm enough to wear shorts and tank top. That day was the beginning of counts which count for real data, towards paper-writing and my Master's thesis. Nothing of note in the counts. Around 1030, I met with two people from the NCC, who had offered to escort me to the sites I was having such trouble finding (see previous post). Turns out that only one of the sites I "found" were sites at all. I'm actually not sure how they expected me to find them without help. Without exception, they're down ATV trails with huge rocks heaved up by the frost, followed by hiking through woods without a trail, climbing over wooden and metal wire fences and through thigh-high poison ivy. Which brings me to the first point of cavalierity (which is now a word): remember I said I had shorts on; now I had to hike for a couple of hours through poison ivy. They had failed to mention the expeditions into the Valley of Urushiol Death. However, I had to know where the sites were, and so outwardly I put on my cavalier armour and trekked onward, trying to ignore the horrified looks from the people I was with. Inwardly, all I could see was this:

He should have been more cavalier, obviously.

I am happy and somewhat incredulous to report that I haven't had any reaction. Yet. Apparently it can take up to five days to appear, but usually does within 24-48 hours, which have passed. I have no idea what shred of karma was protecting me, but I'm not tempting fate again. Pants will be worn to those sites from now on. Although now that I know what it looks like (no, I didn't before Tuesday), I've realized it's bloody well everywhere, even on the roadsides where I do my other counts. Bah. 

Anyway, we spent almost three hours touring the sites and sweating to death. We found their bug-collection tents and equipment utterly shredded and trashed, and inspection determined a bear was the cause. Wonderful. Not so keen about being in the forest alone anymore. They also took me up to Alderville, which is the First Nation reserve just south of Rice Lake. They have a Black Oak Savanna conservation center there, with cool savanna and prairie in various stages of restoration. They gave me permission to do counts there, which is great. 

Wednesday, June 1: More counts in the morning, of course. Was warm right from dawn onwards, but also very windy, which meant I had to stop my counts early :( if the wind gets over 20km/h, counts can't be done because my distances estimates for birds which I don't see but only hear will be skewed. Heard my first eastern towhee, but no visual sadly :(. I did hear strange noises at one sight, and scanned around in time to see a male wild turkey displaying in the middle of a barren field, which was possibly the funniest thing ever.

Ladies...are you not impressed?

After my counts were cut short due to wind, I went back to the Black Oak Savanna center to properly scout out a count site and mark it with my GPS. No one was at the centre, but two dogs were kind enough to escort me around the property: one very excited black lab who would run back and thunk his paws into my chest every now and then, and a quieter goofball of a brown dog with a huge head who just wanted pats, but had jaws big enough to take my leg off. Apparently they're regulars around the savanna, and belong to someone whose property borders the BOS property. After that, I drove around north and east of Alderville, scouting and marking more agricultural sites for counts, since the people from NCC had expressed concern that their jurisdiction wasn't completely represented - most of our sites fall into the GRCA jurisdiction, who we are also in cooperation with. At this point I was starting to panic about being able to count all of these sites, since with the new ones I have just over 70. In fact, I was pretty sure it was impossible, but out came the cavalier armour again, since I didn't want to complain to Joe. But when I got home and got an email asking for yet another tough-access NCC site to be added, I was at the end of my rope. I sent out an email asking for the end of site additions ASAP because I would soon have to start dropping sites in favour of the new additions, since it's just me counting at the moment. Joe swooped in and saved me, sending me an email saying that I was not responsible for counting the new sites I had scouted (thank GOD), and that the NCC could look after those counts if and when they got volunteers or hired contractors. Cavalierity wins out again!

Thursday, June 2: Counts foiled again by winds. I hope they die down tomorrow. I did get some done but not many >< and one of the sites I thought was hay has decided to sprout corn, so I had to go scout out a new hayfield. Also, I don't know what is up with the weather but today I froze my butt off. It was ten degrees for most of my counts. Ten. Down a bit from 42 wouldn't you say??

Of note today: there was a black blotch in a cornfield where I was counting, and binoculars turned up a rose-breasted grosbeak just chillin' on the ground. The field was just bare earth and old cornstalks, so I have no idea what a forest bird like that was doing there. Weirdo. Also, what made my day was an indigo bunting :D I heard unknown song, found darkish little bird 50m away, and upon approaching found this brilliant little blue gem singing his heart out: 

I'm blue, da ba dee da ba di...

After counts it was off to do what I hope is the last of my site-searching. I had gotten detailed directions to the Ochonski prairie in the middle of the Ganaraska forest (remember my fruitless searching before?), and so was making another attempt at finding it. Success! Although to get there you need something better than a car, as the road is utterly ridiculously rocky at the beginning. I had the Escape Hybrid (AKA mah baby) so I was set.

Thanks babe. 

The sites were really neat, and the only thing I have to say against them is that they're in the middle of wild woods, with no one around to hear me scream if a bear should appear and be less than friendly. After seeing the slashed equipment, my nerves were on high alert and everything that rustled suddenly made me freeze and do a panicked scan. 

 

Not pictured: a bear

No bears today though. Hopefully never any other day either. 

Well, that was long-winded. I should be off - have to get things ready for tomorrow's counts. Tomorrow is just counts! No site searching. Unheard of. Pray for low winds.

Love to everyone,

Sarah