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The Blog

57 to go!

4/25/2013

 
It's not every day that you catch three pelicans and narrowly avoid getting struck by lightning.  On both counts, I'd call yesterday a success.
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Scott, Yvan, Elizabeth and I set out early in the morning for Raccoon Island with tags, leg snares, and high hopes.  We set up our first snares near the landing beach, and Scott showed us how to choose nests (ideally on the edge of the colony, with clear sight lines and minimal vegetation) and how to set the snares. 

We missed the first three, but the fourth was a success-- as soon as Scott pulled the noose closed the pelican began to flap, clearly caught by the leg.  We ran up and grabbed it.
After #1 had been tagged, photographed, measured, and released, we re-set the snares for #2, and it didn't take long for us to catch another.  As we were processing, it began to rain lightly, and we noticed a wall of black cloud moving toward us.  Soon after we released the bird, the rain began to fall harder.  We lay flat on the ground as the thunderstorm passed overhead, creating instant mudslides and filling the air around us with electricity.

Once the storm had passed, we set up in the new section of the colony and, after several tries, captured our third bird of the day.  It only took us 25 minutes to tag, process, and release it: well on the way to our 15-minute target.  

Three of our 60 tags are now out in the world, collecting GPS points every two hours.  Pelican tracking is officially underway!

Down on the Bayou

4/21/2013

 
We're all settled into our first field site for the season: the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) in Cocodrie, Louisiana.  Despite looking like an airport, it's actually pretty cozy. "Cocodrie" is Cajun for "alligator", but we've yet to see any reptiles (although the dolphins are exciting enough).
We're still waiting for our satellite tags to arrive; in the meantime, we have a chance to get acquainted with the pelican colonies of Terrebonne Bay thanks to Scott Walter. Scott, a post-doc at Tulane who has been working with pelicans in this area for seven years, knows the best routes through the bayou and is instructing us in pelican-catching techniques. Yesterday we went out with him and his team for a visit to Raccoon Island.

Raccoon is part of the Iles Dernieres, which are the outermost islands in Terrebonne Bay, and it's packed with pelicans, terns, laughing gulls, and waders.  Subsidence and land loss are major concerns in this area, so Raccoon has been selected for habitat reclamation and is being buffered by a still-in-progress levee.
We followed Scott and his team on their monitoring rounds, getting a sense of where we might catch pelicans and enjoying the feeling of being out on a seabird colony again.  Unlike the Texas and Florida colonies, Raccoon Island feels truly remote-- Elizabeth calculated that the boat trip there and back (including a detour to a nearby island) took over sixty miles.
Aside from work, we took in the local culture today at the Folk Art Festival in Chauvin.  There was food and music, and all the neighborhood boats dressed up for a Blessing of the Fleet.     
That's all the news from the bayou.  Hopefully by next time you hear from me we'll have tagged our first pelican!
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Sunset at LUMCON

    Author(s)

    Juliet Lamb is the post-doc in charge of the project. You can check her website at julietlamb.weebly.com

    Rochelle Streker is a M.S. student with the project. She'll be contributing to the blog from her field base in Alabama.

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