Have you ever heard of *this* species…? This week was filled with bad weather and fun food! Bonus: continue reading to learn more about what research I’m planning for my thesis.
This week was extremely uneventful due to winds surpassing 20 knots (really freaking windy) which halted all work. Luckily for us, birds are also not a fan of bad weather, so rain and wind will generally cause them to tuck in somewhere cozy for a while.
Side note: the reason behind this is that when the pressure rises, their cortisol levels rise, serving as an internal mechanism telling them to stop regular activities and find food to bulk up. When it’s about to storm it gets very quiet on the island. The absence of their constant singing is how you know you’re in the calm before the storm.
In the meantime, we read books and found ways to entertain ourselves- we also seemed to eat more when the weather was bad :). It was my coworker, Lisa’s, last week before returning to Norway. We celebrated with a nice dinner (unrelated to the title of this post). We had a nice pasta dinner with wine. In reality this was noodles in a plastic bowl and beer glasses/ coffee mugs filled with cheap, white wine. But we were all grateful to indulge. Considering all our cabins are just a few feet from a steep rockface, it’s definitely not a safe place to have too much wine!
Fieldwork
I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent NOT finding bird nests. I watched fox sparrow parents fly back and forth into the same bush for days to feed their kids- a direct signal of where a nest is. This WOULD have been a good find…the only problem is the nest is located deep within the worst plant on the entire island- blackberry. The island is covered in invasive blackberry. The plant has sharp thorns, chokes out native vegetation, and is straight-up ugly. You can imagine the problems associated with poking through a 7 ft. tall thorny bush on a windy day. My hands, arms, and face ended up covered in scratches. Sometimes when I am walking, I feel a blackberry branch pluck a hat right off my head.
While we know basically everything about song sparrow behaviour, survival, reproduction, and traits, we really know nothing about fox sparrows. Check out the video below, have you ever seen one? We are working this summer to trap and measure + band as many of them as possible! We have probably caught 4 so far, this could be out of a total of well, we don’t know! Fox sparrows have only lived year-round on the island since 1975. During the spring, summer, and fall the fox sparrows and song sparrows ignore each other completely. A prior student in my lab found that during the winter, however, the fox sparrows outcompete the song sparrows for seeds completely due to their larger beaks making them more efficient at feeding… I’m actually planning to focus more on this for my thesis work- but more on that later. I prefer banding song sparrows because the fox sparrows kick and scratch and try to bite me. They are so little that it’s actually quite cute and does not hurt, but one I had last week was such a fighter it managed to escape my hold while I was measuring. Oops!
I’ve been watching birds from a ladder because in some territories I am so deep in the shrubs I can only see what’s going on if I’m high up. It’s only inconvenient when I am trying to support myself while holding my binoculars, clipboard, and coffee all at once. (Don’t worry, mom).
On one of the rocks, we found a large red, lump which I thought was a sponge-like creature after poking it. My research advisor was on the island and informed us it was a large sea snail of some kind. He then proceeded to rip it off the rock and show us its underbelly. After showing us where the snail’s cute little face was, he explained how you could put it through a meat grinder and mix it up with some eggs to create a delicious burger. Lisa (a vegetarian) looked horrified and told the snail we would not put him through a meat grinder. My advisor has studied wildlife all over the world and I am sure he has eaten probably every kind of plant and animal possible.
My co-worker stumbled across a foot the other day. Not just a foot, you can see in the picture the entire leg bone sticking out. We had never seen any bird with that foot before and were very confused. My advisor excitedly told us that was the leg of a “Rhinoceros auklet”, a close relative of puffins and referred to as the “penguins of the north”. It may have been killed by a hawk on another island and who left some remains here. For some reason, this was so interesting to him that we had to note it in our daily logbook.
That’s all for now. I’m hoping the summer weather is on its way!
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed”
-mahatma gandhi
Last Updated on May 19, 2023 by Megan Duchesne