Hello!
It’s Rochelle again, and I know it has been a while since my last blog post. Since then there was a lot of wrapping up to do and I got carried away with end of the season work, but I am now back in Clemson and here to update you on my first field season in Mobile, AL. At my last update, we had been banding and measuring pelican chicks at approximately 3 weeks of age. While banding and measuring chicks is certainly the most intense part of our season, there is still a lot of work to do after! With the color bands on their legs, our birds were much easier to pick out and we spent a lot of time resighting them both in the plots near their nests and out on the edges of the island.
You too can help us: if you see any color-banded pelican along the coast, report them here!
It’s Rochelle again, and I know it has been a while since my last blog post. Since then there was a lot of wrapping up to do and I got carried away with end of the season work, but I am now back in Clemson and here to update you on my first field season in Mobile, AL. At my last update, we had been banding and measuring pelican chicks at approximately 3 weeks of age. While banding and measuring chicks is certainly the most intense part of our season, there is still a lot of work to do after! With the color bands on their legs, our birds were much easier to pick out and we spent a lot of time resighting them both in the plots near their nests and out on the edges of the island.
You too can help us: if you see any color-banded pelican along the coast, report them here!
Along with resighting banded chicks, we also had a lot of feeding surveys to do towards the end of our season. We would do surveys from good vantage points where we could see most nests in the plot, but also were far enough away to not disturb the birds (sneaking into these spots is always the hardest part of the morning). Once settled into our spots, we would record every time an adult visited a nest and fed its chicks. Some days you would sit for hours and only see one adult come in and feed its chicks, and other days you could barely write down the information for one nest that was being fed before another adult would come in and start feeding its own chicks, but that’s just the unpredictability of field work! After we were done with these surveys, we would walk up to any chick that had been recently fed in the hopes of collecting a diet sample (which is a nicer way of saying chick vomit). Believe it or not, just walking up to chicks as a scary human causes many of them to regurgitate as a fear response. Vomiting might seem like a strange thing to do when you are scared, but when approached by a scary potential predator, its gives the predator something to eat (or bag and freeze for later analysis) while you (the flightless chick) make your getaway.
As the season neared the end, many of our chicks were full size and starting to fly (or at least try to), which happens between 8 - 10 weeks of age. During surveys and resights, we would often look up to see a chick fly over us and sometimes could even see our blue band on its leg, which was always cause for celebration. As fledging time approached, we noticed that most chicks were spending a large portion of their days out on the edges of the island, hanging out with other large chicks and adults and even swimming in the bay! Many chicks would see us while standing on the rocks, start to fly and get a few flaps in before dropping into the water with a splash. It was exciting to see chicks that were pink and naked when I first started, now be fully feathered, flying, and diving for fish! When a majority of the chicks we were following reached this stage, approximately 70 days of age, we finished up the season with one last resighting and vegetation survey before migrating back to Clemson for a new semester!
Now that I am back at Clemson, taking classes and working at my desk, I often miss the sunny field days of my first Project Pelican field season! I do have many reminders of what a busy field season it was as I go through and organize the data we collected. I also have all of the diet samples we collected that now must be analyzed in the lab. I have just started thawing out our frozen diet samples, and soon I will be identifying species of fish found in the samples, weighing, extracting the lipids, and ashing the samples in order to estimate the energy density of the fish. I’m excited for the new data I will have at the end of this procedure, though less excited about smell from all the frozen fish (sorry lab mates)!
While I am happy to be back at Clemson and working in the lab, my first field season with Project Pelican went pretty well and I look forward to being back out in the colonies next year, sun, storms, and all!
While I am happy to be back at Clemson and working in the lab, my first field season with Project Pelican went pretty well and I look forward to being back out in the colonies next year, sun, storms, and all!