Day 119: Quiet, calm, and catching cute storm-petrels!

Well it's finally down to the last two weeks of my stay on Kent Island!! I can't believe I've already been here for almost 5 months of my life. Time has flown by, summer has flown by! It's been a wonderfully warm, dry summer here on the island, but there are already hints of fall starting to creep in. Cooler breezes, migrants passing through, and berries, berries everywhere!

As promised last time, today I'm going to talk about how I got to play with petrel babies for the past month (the Leach's storm-petrel to be precise, AKA fluffy adorableness)! Once I returned to the island from my brief, but busy, vacation, Savannah sparrow field work was at a bit of a winding down point. Adults were done breeding for the season, which meant no more nest searching, no more recording. It was very odd to return to such a quiet island (except for the speakers blaring out Alaskan Savannah sparrow songs). Thankfully, this also meant the gulls were finished breeding and incubating, making them significantly less angry! 

It was also quiet on the island because the Bowdoin students finished up their summer field work and headed back home. Unfortunately, they left the same day I returned, and our paths did not cross (sad faces). However, with the kitchen back to ourselves, Raquel and I (the last remaining Kent Island inhabitants) managed to keep up the steady flow of baking, and we welcomed any visitors with our over abundance of treats.

Since we had a bit of extra time during our daily schedule, we volunteered to help with the long-term petrel project here on the island. Leach's storm-petrels nest in the thousands (possibly up to 10 thousand pairs or more!) on Kent Island, but because they spend most of their time far out in the sea, and because they nest in underground burrows, if you didn't know what to look for (or listen for) you may never even know they were there! Our job was to monitor twenty burrows and measure the daily growth of any nestlings in those burrows. This basically involves sticking your arm into a hole in the ground (a method researchers here call 'grubbing') and pulling out a little ball of fluffy jelly. When I say this I am not exaggerating. The burrows are sometimes so deep that you have to reach in all the way up to your shoulder. Some burrows are too deep or curve too much to actually reach into, so the researchers have to dig new entry holes, just to access the birds for banding and measuring. These holes are then covered with a 'roof board', and act as a secret entrance just for us.

The dirty arm tan: a sign of a successful day of grubbing

Here's a little video of one of the burrows I grubbed on a daily basis:






As you can see, they are indeed little fluffy balls of jelly!! They are squishy and adorable and this is exactly  how they look when they hatch! What a difference from ugly, naked little songbird nestlings! Which, by the way, I still find cute in their own way. But seriously.. what's cuter than this?

It's so fluffy I could die!!!

There are eyes somewhere under that fluffy shag

If I could do nothing more than cuddle petrel chicks, my life would be complete

If that wasn't convincing enough, here is a video of a petrel baby making appropriately cute squeaking noises:


 


It was incredible to see how much the nestlings grew within a single day. It was like watching babies grow up right before our eyes! Except like a million times faster than human babies (sometimes they gained up to a third of their own body weight in one feeding)!!

Big Bertha

Needless to say, reaching our daily fluffball quota was definitely my favourite part of the day during the slow SAVS season!

And of course, the adults are pretty cute too. Not so fluffy, and not nearly as fat (nestlings actually gain enough weight from feedings that they eventually outweigh adults, and have to fast before they will be able to leave the burrow and start flying!).

I make cute, fat babies. Also, I was once a cute, fat baby.

Probably more adorable than the looking at the adults though, is listening to them. As you may remember me describing in one of my earlier posts, the petrel calls are absolutely magical. Since I really can't do them justice by describing them, here is a video (a very dark video, taken at around 3am) with some audio of them singing. Not much to see other than me looking at trees in the dark, but sit back and listen! It's a bit quiet, so turn up the volume.






Other than petrel cuteness and excessive baking, we did manage to achieve a Kent Island first. We finally took the plunge (literally) and jumped into the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy. No need to worry about the current sweeping us away though (or, like, sharks and stuff). During low tide, at the very south end of the island there is a small tidal pool deep enough swim in, and this is where we took our 'refreshing' dip in the sea. Just to prove our plight, here is a video of us braving the icy Atlantic! There may be some non-PG-13 language expressed shortly after the jump, I apologize, but this was not just your run-of-the-mill ice bucket challenge.






That's all the edu-tainment I have for today folks! Hopefully I'll get a chance to do at least one last post before the field season is over. Can't believe it's almost time to go home! Next time there will be more SAVS related news, as we are in the midst of mistnetting adventures for the last stretch of our stay here on Kent Island. See you all soon!