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Weekend Updates

5/26/2013

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!

The Texas Riviera

5/14/2013

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.

On our first visit to Shamrock Island, we were accompanied by Mark Dumesnil of Texas Nature Conservancy and Beau Hardegree of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. We showed them our capture technique, and they gave us a quick tour of the main pelican nesting area. Luckily, Shamrock's pelicans nest away from the other wading birds on the island, which number 20,000 in total and include some unusual species like Sooty Terns and Reddish Egrets. Beau and Mark showed us where we could trap pelicans without disturbing the rest of the colony.

Unlike the pelicans in Louisiana, the birds of Shamrock Island nest mainly on the ground, and capturing has been pretty smooth so far aside from some unexpected rain on Sunday. Yesterday was a particularly beautiful day to be out on the island.

We've also been conducting behavioral observations of recently-tagged birds. While a few spend hours preening, they seem to settle into a normal routine pretty quickly. Observations give us a rare chance to focus our full attention on the rhythms of a pelican colony-- feeding, napping, rearranging the nest sticks, fighting, napping again.

Port Aransas is an odd, fun little town, full of souvenir shops and honky-tonk karaoke and giant plaster sculptures of marine life. Walking out on a jetty the other day, we were surrounded by pods of dolphins, green sea turtles, black terns, and pelicans, all foraging in the bright-blue water.

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!

Here come the data points

5/6/2013

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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Weekend Updates

The Texas Riviera

Here come the data points

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