Hello again! It’s me, Rochelle Streker, a Master’s student for Project Pelican. Sorry it has been so long since my last blog post, but winter is mostly filled with classes, lab work, and organizing and analyzing data (which would be much harder to write a blog post about). I’m back now with another update from the field!
I started my second and final field season this April back at Gaillard Island, in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Despite the usual boat problems, we were able to get out to the colony just as the Brown pelicans started nesting and laying their eggs. Unfortunately, this winter's storms left Cat Island (the other colony I studied last year) without any vegetation available for pelicans to nest, so there is no nesting occurring there this year. Nesting at Gaillard was booming from the start, and has only increased every week since! It was only at the start of this month that things began to slow and settle down, and we have not seen any new nests being built in the past few days.
I started my second and final field season this April back at Gaillard Island, in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Despite the usual boat problems, we were able to get out to the colony just as the Brown pelicans started nesting and laying their eggs. Unfortunately, this winter's storms left Cat Island (the other colony I studied last year) without any vegetation available for pelicans to nest, so there is no nesting occurring there this year. Nesting at Gaillard was booming from the start, and has only increased every week since! It was only at the start of this month that things began to slow and settle down, and we have not seen any new nests being built in the past few days.
Just like last year, we set up plots with nests we will follow throughout the season. We also placed trail cameras to record nesting and feeding patterns in the same way we did last season, and put out the temperature dataloggers again in a variety of nests across Gaillard. The Army Corp of Engineers made some modifications to Gaillard Island this year, widening the berm that surrounds the island and removing the thick vegetation that covered it over the years. We already noticed a large amount of Brown pelicans choosing to nest on the interior of the berm, taking advantage of the larger broader berm. We are following some nests on the exterior too (which is still the more popular spot!) to see how interior and exterior nesting might compare.
Brown pelicans are not the only ones taking advantage of Gaillard and the wide variety of nesting habitat it has to offer! We have seen Laughing gulls and Royal and Sandwich terns in the drier, bare areas, White ibises in the bushes, and Red-winged blackbirds and Canada geese in the tall grasses and sedges, all nesting about the island in and around the Brown pelicans. I can hardly wait to see chicks from the other species as they begin to hatch, as most of these nests still have eggs in them. Because Brown pelicans incubate and mature to fledging age slower than most bird species nesting around the Gulf, they are often the first ones with eggs laid and they often start to have chicks while other species are still incubating eggs.
Since we started in April, we have seen plenty of hatched eggs in the nest we monitor. Most chicks are still at or under the two week mark, but the colony is getting louder and louder everyday as they mature. With banding right around the corner, it is hard to not get excited and nervous for when it will be time to catch and band “our” chicks. With ground nesting more common this year compared to last year, I am sure we will be running around like maniacs trying to catch the right chicks before they crèche together (which is when all the chicks group together, and make it hard to identify individuals!). I’ll be sure to update you with all the stories after we band all of our chicks, but until then keep an eye out for banded Brown pelicans, and I will be back with another blog post soon this summer!
Rochelle
Rochelle