The Fall Begins!!!

The transition from the Summer Seabird breeding season to the Fall migration period always comes during the second half of August. With the field crew change, so too do changes come over the Island. The breeding birds are finishing up their nesting activity, while seal pups born in June and July are quickly gaining weight. The alternating days of wind and sun and socked-in fog that generally characterize the summer season start to give way to calmer weather and high overcast typical of fall. Northern-breeding species of birds have begun their southbound migration; many stop off to visit the Farallones on their way to warmer wintering grounds.

The fall migration crew this year consists of biologist Jim Tietz, out for his ninth fall season, Matt Brady, back for his sixth fall, and Oscar Johnson, a Farallon rookie. We joined Jessie Beck, a seabird intern that will be staying with us until mid-September, to continue monitoring any lingering breeding seabirds. Our arrival on August 21st was uneventful, though one of the first landbirds we saw was a Least Flycatcher at the Heligoland Tree (the one Monterey Pine on the Island). It’s always great to start the season off with a vagrant!

Variable light-to-strong northwest winds prevailed during our first week on the Island. Although these winds tend to keep migrants onshore, a few did manage to come out for a visit. Notable were several Blue Grosbeaks, including four together, an early-ish Hermit Warbler, a family of Greater White-fronted Geese, three Long-eared Owls, and a few Sabine’s Gulls seen during seawatches. Oddly, despite being a relatively common bird in the Southwest, there are fewer records of Blue Grosbeak for the Island than there are of Least Flycatcher!

 

 We set up mist-nets at the Rixford and Coast Guard trees, in anticipation of catching and banding migrants, but to date the weather has not allowed us to open the nets much. Not only is this because high winds are not conducive to catching birds, but also because the strong northwest winds have kept birds away from the Island, so there have simply not been many birds to catch. However, we have managed to catch a few birds. The most exciting of these came on the first day we opened nets, when we caught one of the Long-eared Owls. Luckily, we had locking size-5 bands (big bands, much larger than the bands we use for songbirds), so we were able to band it, and now we look every day for our banded owl!

 

A few migrant insects rode some of the lighter winds out to the Island. The most exciting was a Gray Hairstreak butterfly that Oscar found resting on a Lavatera bush on the 24th. This species was last seen on the Island 7 years ago. Other, more expected insects included several Black Saddlebags, Blue-eyed Darners, and a number of Variegated Meadowhawks (all dragonflies), as well as daily counts of West Coast Ladies (butterfly) in the range of 7-15 individuals. Another unusual species of insect came with two Blue Dashers, a species of dragonfly that had, until 2008, only been seen once before on the Island; there are now about six records for the Island.

Although the bulk of migration has yet to come, we’ve found a few vagrants aside from the Least Flycatcher. During a lull in the howling northwesterlies of recent days, a young female Blackburnian Warbler making her first journey south paid the Island a short visit, while an American Redstart made an even-more brief pause at the Lighthouse. A skittish Lark Bunting lurked on the Terrace for two days as well. Although on the early side of things, these three species are regular during fall migration. Late August is a good time to hope for a truly rare bird or two also. Two such species did grace the Island briefly. On the 29th of August, Oscar found a small, green-backed hummingbird that, after giving us some quick looks as it drank from some flowering Lavatera, we determined was the Island’s sixth-ever Ruby-throated Hummingbird! After capturing the bird in one of our mist-nets and examining it in-hand, we were able to confirm the identity with 100% certainty, a rare claim indeed for California. Coincidentally, this was not the first Ruby-throated Hummingbird for California this year. One was seen at Keith Hansen’s Wildlife Gallery in Bolinas, Marin County, for a few days at the beginning of the month. Even the rarity of the elusive Ruby-throated Hummingbird, however, was no match for the show-stopping flock of White-faced Ibis that circled the Island several times on the 24th! While mainland birders may scoff at ibis in the face of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Faralloners know that, from an Island perspective, ibis are among the rarest of species to ever occur on the Island, in the company of such outstanding birds as Red-flanked Bluetail, Common Rosefinch and Golden-cheeked Warbler. Why might this be? Because, up until the 24th, there was only one modern record of White-faced Ibis, a single bird, seen in 1998! So far, Fall Season 2010 is shaping up to be a fantastic fall. Stay tuned for more vagrants!

In addition to the more sought-after vagrants, we have number of other interesting, or just plain photogenic birds and mammals around the island in the past week.

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Although Ring-billed Gulls are one of the more common gull species on the mainland, they are an uncommon species offshore, and therefore also uncommon on the Farallon Islands. This individual, a juvenile, is a somewhat early fall arrival.

Occasionally we get California Gulls with field-readable color bands. This individual came from San Francisco Bay, but we also get individuals from Mono Lake.

This is one of the many bleached hatch-year California Gulls that show up on the island. We suspect that many of these are from Mono Lake, which is supported by the fact that the two Mono Lake birds that we have found show this bleached plumage.

Although not a particularly exciting bird anywhere in California, Eurasian Collared-Dove only showed up on the Farallon Islands for the first time in 2006.  A pair of these birds spent the whole summer here this year for the first time. Will they breed next year?

Thankfully for us, these photogenic birds have been particularly common on the island this year. Our surveys over the past few weeks have indicated that their nesting activity has increased.

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In addition to the expected west coast subspecies leutescens, we also get a few of the gray-headed Great Basin subpecies orestera. This individual stuck around for about a week as it molted into formative plumage.

"My, what pointy teeth you have!"  Although Steller Sea Lions are larger and tend to dominate California Sea Lions, Stellers numbers are dwindling along the West Coast.  Several causes have been attributed to their decline including environmental changes in the North Pacific, overfishing, and pollution. California Sea Lion numbers, on the other hand, expanded rapidly over the last few decades following passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. 

Delving into the Gull JuJu Archives…

Here on the Island, we’ve noticed that the Western Gulls have a particularly unique and fascinating taste for edible-looking things and nest decorations. When walking through gull territories, one will often notice a collection of rib bones, regurgitated bits of plastic trash and other such goodies, brought back lovingly from the mainland, some 30 miles away.

Over the years, we’ve collected our favorite findings and stowed them away into the Gull JuJu Archives. Here is a peek into the various juju tastes….

By far, the most common juju items found are decrepit plastic figures. A variety of army men, Winnie-the-Poohs, Lego characters, rubber duckies and many more have found their way into gull’s bills and stomachs. Two of our particular favorites are the Beanie Baby fish with bulging eyes (top left) and the slightly terrifying plastic baby doll leg.

Gulls seem to display an affinity for small round things as well, in addition to particularly colorful items such as cocktail picks. The distances that gull juju travel also differ. On the left are pinniped tags from Antarctica, along with bits of sealion fur, and a mermaid pouch likely from a nearby beach.

 

 

Remember thinking that cutting up your credit cards and disposing of them in the trash will make them safely disappear forever? Wrong. Pocket contents are also a gull favorite, be it your keys, rolling papers or iPod slips. We find it all here.

 

Unfortunately, the odd fishing hooks, lures and squid lights are also found. Although the birds who brought them onto the island avoided the potentially fatal repercussions of these objects, many birds often don’t. Due to poor by-catch monitoring, little is known about how many seabirds are entangled in fishing nets and hooks every year, and what the impacts are on their populations. However, while these lucky birds evaded death, many with similar tastes do not.

And last, but certainly not least, the oddball egg is a rare find. Is this proof of a mysterious 14th breeding species, or merely just another bit of Western Gull JuJu?

Whale Town

Last week the clouds lifted for a few days allowing us a glimpse of life off the island. Not only could we see civilization on the mainland, but other marine life was suddenly visible. The most prominant visitors we had were the Humpback Whales.

Two Humpbacks near the Farallones

These whales are well known for their acrobatic aerial displays (breaching) where they jump, and often spin, out of the water. Although the function of this behavior is not known, it is thought to possibly be involved in communication and/or ectoparisite removal. In any case, it's always incredible to watch. From the island, we have seen numerous whales breaching, tail slapping and flipper slapping. Our high count of Humpbacks last week was 91 in a single day! The number of Humpbacks observed from the island varies significantly from year to year but in the last two years we have seen very high numbers here in the late summer and fall. The high count last year was 107 on Oct 8, the second most seen in a single day (highest count was 125 on November 8 1998). It is definitely unusual to see numbers this high already in August so we may still break the record.

Humpback Whale showing how it got its name

 
Humpbacks weren't the only cetacean species spotted from the island last week. We also saw Risso's dolphins, Northern Right Whale Dolphins, Gray Whales and Blue Whales.

Risso's Dolphins near the Farallones

Blue Whales are the largest animal to have ever lived on this earth and were once extensively harvested. PRBO began recording recording cetacean sightings from the Farallones in 1973, only a few years after whales became protected in the US. The first Blue Whale was not seen from the island until 1978 and our counts since then have documented an increasing number of whales present in this area. Our high count last week was 7 in one day!

Blue Whale back. It's hard to get a feel for how big there are from this.

Although its always a treat to see whales, seeing them in these numbers is especially thrilling. Humpbacks were hunted extensively in the early part of last century, down to perhaps as few as 1400 animals in the North Pacific. Once whales became protected, Humpbacks and other species began to recover. Currently, the North Pacific population is estimated to be closer to 20,000 with around 1200 of those in the California/Oregon/Washington Stock (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/cetaceans/humpbackwhale.htm). Counts recorded from the Farallones have helped to document the increase in the Humpback population as well as other species of cetaceans.

Cassin's Auklet chicks are fed krill by their parents

The presence of this many whales is yet another indication that there is a lot of krill around. Humpbacks and Blue Whales are baleen whales which means they filter large amounts of water to gather up their small prey. Humpbacks tend to eat a variety of small prey including krill and small fish, but Blue Whales feed almost exclusively on krill. They are the Cassin's Auklet of whales. The only difference is they are about 3000 times the size of a Cassin's Auklet! The presence of Blue whales, and the fact that Cassin's Auklets are producing lots of fat, healthy chicks, indicates the high abundance of krill in the vicinity of the island.







Happy as the whale recovery stories are, significant threats to whales remain. We witnessed one of the most serious last week when we found a dead Humpback floating near the island that appeared to have been struck by a ship. There were numerous deep lacerations on the whales left side. As this incident demonstrates, ship strikes are still all too common and remain a serious concern and cause of mortality to many whales.

Dead humpback spotted near the islands

Lacerations on the left side of the whale likely from a ship propeller

Baby Chicks = Diet Watch/Collection

There is nothing more exciting than cute little baby chicks! Right?!? Right!!!!


Three species that have already fledged some chicks are the Common Murre, the Cassin's Auklet, and the Pigeon Guillemot.  The Rhinocerous Auklets haven't fledged their chicks quite yet, but are getting close!

adult Common Murre in breeding (summer) plumage

adult Pigeon Guillemots in breeding (summer) plumage

When chicks first hatch, they're covered in down, which is really really soft and makes them look like little puffballs of happiness!
The Pigeon Guillemot downy-feathered chick is jet black and weighs about 35 grams when we first weigh them.  They also have a lot of attitude, so like to scream a lot. Finger-wagging them doesnt improve their behavior; usually they'll just bite.

The Cassin's Auklet downy-feathered chicks is grayer than the Pigeon Guillemot, and their sites are monitored in the boxes with removable lids.

The Common Murre downy-feathered chick looks like it has that sweet '90's frosted hairdo that only the coolest guys in town could pull off.

The Rhinocerous Auklet chicks are really puffy and also black.

Soon after the chicks hatch, we try to figure out what the adults are bringing back to feed their young. This helps us to understand what is going on with fish populations in the area, and how they affect breeding seabirds.How do we do this? In different ways for each species of course!
For the Pigeon Guillemots, we sit at Garbage Gulch and Lighthouse Hill (alternately), and watch the whole fish that the adults bring back for their young, and record 1) the site they went to, 2) the type of fish they brought in, 3) the size of the fish (approx), and 4) the adult's band combination. Here is Russ, Annie, Jessie, and Michelle in the middle of a shift change at Garbage Gulch.

We monitor Common Murre diet from the Murre Blind above the Upper Shubrick Point study plot.

This is an adult murre bringing back a rockfish, the fish of choice of 2010!

Netting for Rhinocerous Auklets at dusk is a two-fold effort. First of all, it is a mark-recapture, and secondly, it allows us to see what fish the adults are bringing back for their chicks since they drop the fish when they are captured in the mistnet. We collect their fish and process them after we close the net.





Cassin's Auklet diet is a little different, since it doesn't bring back whole fish like the other three species do. In fact, they don't feed on fish at all! They eat krill! They regurge it back up for their young when they return to their colony at night, and we collect 100 samples of this regurge every year for lab analysis.

Cassin's Auklet diet is especially important because they pretty much only eat two species of krill (= their diet is extremely limited), which makes them a good indicator species. It's reasonable to suggest some ideas about the productivity of the ocean based on the productivity of the Cassin's Auklet.

We continue diet watches and diet collections until the chicks fledge and can forage for themselves.

Most of the murre chicks have fledged or are about to fledge.

The transformation that chicks go through is astounding. After just 25 days, the Pigeon Guillemots have grown from 35 grams to 500 grams! Monitoring the growth of chicks is another indicator of how well their parents are provisioning them. These feisty, poopy suckers sure love to eat.

This is a fully-feathered Pigeon Guillemot chick.  Look at its bulge of fat! It must be getting fed a lot!

We've just started banding a few of the Rhinocerous Auklet chicks, as they're approaching their mostly to fully feathered stages.

Rhinocerous Auklet chick, partly to mostly feathered but still has quite a bit of down

The Cassins Auklet seem to be having a wildly productive year - the majority of them have fledged their first brood of chicks and are currently sitting on their second broods!

This is a fully feathered CAAU chick the day before it fledged

Birds obviously undergo a wild transformation in the few weeks that it takes for their parents to raise them to a point where they can either fly or take them to sea, and it takes an enormous amount of energy and risk on both parents' part to feed their chicks to their nesting site, yet they spend this energy and take these risks to raise their offspring to fledge. Let's hear it for mama and papa birds!

Island Dreams

The Farallones is a very intense place. When you first arrive out here, you are surrounded by sights, sounds, and some choice smells that most people have never experienced. After a hard day of fieldwork, people tend to have some pretty elaborate dreams, most of them about the island in some fashion. For the past 20 years, we have been recording these dreams in our nightly Farallon Journal.

While the stuff of these dreams is ample material for a whole PhD on the psychology of field biologists, I have found during my 10 seasons out here that most dreams fall into one of two major categories – Invasion Dreams and Anxiety Dreams.

The Farallon National Wildlife Refuge is closed to public access. This is done to protect the sensitive wildlife populations that call this special place home. While trespassing violations are extremely rare, the threat of them has made for many exciting “Invasion Dreams” had by biologists over the decades. These dreams are often hilarious; a quick scan of the journal reveals dreams of island attack by aliens or a band of pirates led by Uma Thurman. I specialize in these sorts of dreams, and tend to have a few choice ones every year. Here is a sampling from my own personal invasion dreams- the Russ Bradley collection

- I had to prevent tourists from feeding popcorn to Common Murres
- Everyone I ever knew showed up on the island, disturbing wildlife
- A 2 story house full of people washed up on the beach
- A Super Villain joined our volunteer Farallon Patrol and tried to take over the island
- Hundreds of people showed up at the “Farallon Cruise Ship Terminal”
- A Harrier Jet landed on West End Island - a completely closed Wilderness Area - and dropped off a huge group of rock climbers
- I found 2 palm trees and had to cut them down and remove them (a plant invasion dream...)
- There were small children and dogs running everywhere on the island, crushing seabird burrows and causing mayhem. I have this one all the time.

While these invasion dreams may seem absolutely ridiculous, they do remind us of how special and sensitive the Farallon Islands are.

Now for the anxiety dreams. These often involve interns thinking they have conducted a study wrong, and will soon face the wrath of us supervising biologists. One intern dreamt he had forgotten to check half of the Ashy Storm Petrel breeding sites all season. Another walked out to her gull plot to find it full of chicks, and she had missed the laying and hatching of eggs entirely. Another dreamt she accidentally left the island early on the wrong boat, and that I was furious with her for missing out on cormorant banding. Here is a scan of a dream sent to us by one of our former interns, a year after she had left the island. She talks about improper banding of Pigeon Guillemots, and how potential interns were forced to swim in shark infested waters to prove their worthiness to work on the island.

Again, just a tad extreme, but there is a moral here. Despite the sometimes mad world of dreams, everyone takes their work out here very seriously, and want to make sure they do their best to ensure good science and conservation are being done.

The darker side...

Common Murre with a fresh egg

Not too long ago, it felt like Easter. Eggs were popping up all over the place - Western Gulls, Pigeon Guillemots, Ashy Storm Petrels, Common Murres, Brandt's Cormorants, Cassin's Auklets, and Rhinoceros Auklets - just about all the birds on the island. It's so contagious that even the Farallon Weed has started resprouting. While most of these birds are still laying eggs, some have started to hatch.

Cassin's Auklet chick

Cassin's Auklets were the first with their little gray fuzz balls. As of the first of this month, we got our first Pigeon Guillemot chick, a little black fuzz ball. Others, Rhinoceros Auklets and Common Murres, have started hatching within the last week. Even to hardened biologists, hatchlings are very cute and always bring out a collective "Aww." They are small soft balls of fluff that fit in your hand and are so sweet because they don't know how to defend themselves yet.

But, no matter how adorable, one of the recent additions to our hatchlings also brings a sense of dread.

Newly hatched Western Gull Chicks

How can these innocent little creatures inspire such feelings? Let me explain.

When I arrived in April, I was a clean, relatively innocent intern arriving to a rather quiet island. Birds were calling, but all were nice. They weren't breeding yet, so they didn't have anything to defend. If they happened to be in your path, they just moved out of the way as you approached. Once "Easter" arrived, the noise level of the island started to increase exponentially (to a volume and pitch that I am certain will contribute to future hearing loss) and birds no longer moved out of your way. Instead, they attack you for coming into their territory.

Western Gull in attack mode

Western gulls are by far the most aggressive defenders of their nests. They have a very distinctive call that they scream at you as you approach their nest. If that isn’t enough to make you go away, they try to nip at you (and sometimes succeed), or they swoop back and forth over you in a U-shape, making a terrorizing call mere seconds before depositing a generous helping of stinky guano on your person. If none of these attempts have chased you to leave their territory, they will resort to the full aerial assault. They will fly down at your face or head, attempting to hit you with their feet or their bill. Often adding more guano to the arsenal.  I have been hit in the head by a gull’s bill and whacked on the shoulder by their feet and it hurts a lot more than you would expect. It's amazing the force and power that those Western Gulls have. And this just gets worse as time goes on. Imagine getting hit repeatedly in the head with no respite, wearing clothes without an inch of clean space and that is what life here on the island is soon to become.

Field jacket afert checking gull nests

My patchwork duct tape pants and slowly degrading jacket (already severely worn from climbing, sliding, shimmying around on the granite slopes) are being tortured further by getting covered in various colors, and smells, of Western Gull excretions. While my head is gradually being bashed in by these callous, cold-hearted birds. I am no longer the innocent intern. No longer do I go outside without something covering my head. I know which birds require the extra adornment of a hard hat. Earplugs are permanently stored in my pockets for easy use.

So it is important to remember that while chicks are cute, they bring vicious, merciless adults with them, which they will later become if they fledge. Inside those delightful downy balls beats a cold, cold heart.