(Just kidding, this is all of the foraging tracks from FE08 since April. It looks pretty impressive, though!)
Team Pelican has had a busy week, with twelve tags deployed (29 and counting, for those of you keeping score at home), two island censuses, construction projects, and behavioral observations. More on that shortly! In the meantime, here's how some of our birds are spending Memorial Day Weekend: 504 (Raccoon Island): Loafing on a post 518 (Chester Island): Taking a spin around Matagorda Bay 516 (Shamrock Island): Enjoying the surf off Mustang Island 514 (Shamrock Island): Relaxing by a pier 508 (Felicity Island): Overachieving as usual (Just kidding, this is all of the foraging tracks from FE08 since April. It looks pretty impressive, though!) 517 (Shamrock Island): Spending some quality time at the nest Happy Memorial Day, whatever you decide to do with it!
Greetings from Port Aransas, Texas! We have been here for about a week, capturing pelicans at Shamrock Island in Corpus Christi Bay. Corpus Christi is the country's 8th-largest port, and from the window of our house at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute we can watch ships pass through the channel and make their way toward the city or out to sea.
We'll be sad to leave Port Aransas tomorrow, but we won't be going far-- just up the coast to Port O'Connor. Stay tuned!
I haven't talked much about our technology, but gadgets are at the heart of this project: specifically, 65-gram transmitters designed for birds by Northstar Science and Technology. The tags we've deployed so far (photos in the previous post) are a brand-new technology called GSM, or CTT (cellular terminal transmitter), that uses cell phone towers to upload GPS data. When they aren't near towers, they store the GPS points to transmit at a later date. For our field sites in Louisiana, where cell reception at the nesting colonies is poor, this means long periods without transmission (while the bird is out of range) followed by lots of data (when the bird gets close enough to a cell tower to transmit its stored locations). It was a few days from when we caught our first pelicans to when we began to see what they had been doing, conveniently delivered to our computers. The data arrive as a set of GPS points, but the web portal allows us to easily view the data as a map, and to follow the tracks of the bird as it moves from point to point. This particular pelican nested on Felicity Island, our second capture site, but we can only see its latest GPS points when it goes south to forage near the Fourchon Helibase. Luckily, it seems to make a trip south every few days to update us. The units are currently programmed to take a GPS point every hour and a half, but we can make scheduling adjustments depending on battery voltage, time of year, or when the pelican visits an area of interest. Technology isn't without its headaches, but before remote-downloading tags the best way to gather these data would have been to use radio tags and track them down by airplane, resulting in a small handful of very expensive and time-consuming locations. The idea of a transmitter that sends regular locations straight to a computer, and that doesn't require re-capturing or even re-sighting the bird who carries it, is pretty incredible. Over the next few years, it'll be even more incredible to watch where all of them go.
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Author(s)Juliet Lamb is the post-doc in charge of the project. You can check her website at julietlamb.weebly.com Get the latest blogs in your mail box: suscribe to our RSS Feed
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June 2018
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