To make up for the last post, here is the one with lots of pictures!

The past few weeks have been really crazy. As mentioned, I went through ATV training, which was a lot of fun! I've driven them a few times before, but it was good to have a refresher for this summer.  Other than that, I've generally been working with our plovers and oystercatchers. The first chicks are finally beginning to hatch!

here is the first American oystercatcher chick!

The plovers are a little late, but we're expecting chicks any day now, too.

A \piping plover nest

An exclosure, the fence we set up to keep out predators and people

 On the weekends, I've been volunteering to help a gentleman that bands birds - we capture them in mist nets (a special net with a very fine mesh designed to not hurt the birds), take them to our little station, put a band on the leg, and record information like species, wing and tail length, weight, sex, etc. Then we let them go! It's very fun.

Holding a yellow warbler

Carolina chickadee!

female orchard oriole (this was a tricky one to identify!)

female white-eyed vireo, looking pretty angry...

this is a yellow-shafted flicker, a type of woodpecker. Here's the man showing off the yellow!

here's a diamondback terrapin we found on the beach

his pretty shell :)

It's pretty great working here. Even though half of us interns work on the beach all day, every day, now that the weather is nicer we've been going to the beach in our spare time, too!

Hello everyone!

I'm sorry I didn't wrap up last summer with a neat post...oops. Anyway, it's a new year, and thus, a new summer. I've been at my position for a month now, and settling in nicely. This year I am working in a biological position again, specifically monitoring the productivity of breeding shorebirds. Specifically, we monitor Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) and American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus).

The majority of my days here are spent walking along the beaches, looking for plover and oystercatcher nests. We check every day to see how many eggs they have, and to make sure the parents are incubating the eggs. We have to worry about predators and people, so for vulnerable nests, we put up special fences called exclosures to protect the nests.

However, the life of a biologist is never predictable, and we've had plenty of other things thrown our way. So far I helped work crowd control for a NASA rocket launch (the refuge is just across the bay from the launchpad, so we got to watch!), taken care of stranded marine mammals and sea turtles, surveyed for other shorebirds, surveyed for pine bark beetle damage, and plenty of other things. My training has even included driving a boat, to get to some of the islands, and we'll be doing ATV training later this week!

On top of all that, I've had plenty of fun on my free time hanging out with my fellow interns. We've been exploring the town, and the rest of the refuge - it was very exciting to see the famous ponies :)

I don't have many photos yet, but I'll be sure to share them when I get some good ones.

Hi everyone! I've been mostly been working in the office the past month or so (we've gotten so busy!), but I realized that there was one last set of photos I forgot to post - and it's from my favorite field day this summer :)

On this day, we went out to put radio transmitter "backpacks" on American Oystercatchers, for a grad student who is studying the movement of birds in the area. They have proposed putting a windmill up, and they need to see if it will affect the birds.

We don't have many of these birds here, and the day we went out were poor AMOY-tagging conditions, but we still managed to tag one bird which was really exciting.

Setting up the woosh net. 

The net is ready and waiting! 

The AMOY decoy!

Watched these guys for probably a good half an hour, waiting for them to get into position...! Only one cooperated.

It was very difficult to catch the actual catching of the bird on net, because it went from waiting silently for the bird to get into the right spot, then suddenly the trigger was pulled and it was all over! What happened essentially is that there was a bungee cord strung along the length of the net, and then back to our hiding place in the beach grass. When the bird was in the right spot, the trigger person would pull the cord, releasing the net, which would go up and over the bird, trapping it.

Extracting the Oystercatcher from the net

Hello, bird!

Absolutely gorgeous bird :)

Banding the bird for identification

This lady became 8K

Bands on both legs, to make sure whoever may spot her can read the band!

Attaching the "backpack"

Making sure it is nice and snug

Processed and ready to go!

Here is what the transmitter looks like!

We spent all day and only got the one, but it was still lots of fun!

More Fieldwork

Hi everyone! I've been super busy lately, sorry I haven't been able to share pictures recently! But I'm making up for it now... :)

A few days after the Tern Census, I got to go out and tag horseshoe crabs! It was really cool.

A tagged horseshoe crab

HSC waiting to be tagged (well, put back in the water at least)

The smaller birds are chicks of the herring gulls!
They look like tiny ostriches running around, they were too funny.

Interesting fact, horseshoe crabs aren't crabs at all! They are arachnids, making them more closely related to spiders or scorpions.

Since then, I've been doing more officework, nothing too exciting to talk about. Yesterday, however, I got to work with the terns again! We were doing a productivity count - basically all summer, they count the number of eggs, see how many survive to fledge, and so on. For me, though, it was basically a day of counting (and playing with) baby tern chicks!

A brand new tern chick, too little to disturb.

Some older chicks...they always like to cuddle together :)

Little chicks learning to use their legs! Running around everywhere.

The "chick corral," where we rounded them up while counting them

This adult tern was trying to stand on the nest box, but kept sliding down...

The biologist, showing off a Laughing Gull chick

One of the rarer Roseate Tern chicks

"Rosie" chicks have purple legs!

Finally got to see the seals

Tern Census

Today was great! I finally got a chance to do some field work, and I definitely hit the ground running. I participated in the Tern census, where we count every egg/nest we can find of the Common Terns that nest on the refuge, as well as any other birds in the area (but there aren't nearly as many, so it's not a big part). I had so much fun! There are about 14,000 birds that live on the island, and it's almost scary because they do not like intruders, so they try to dive-bomb you when you get close...but I thought it was pretty fun! It's also super loud in there, with literally thousands of birds screeching and squawking around you! Here are some pictures...

The nest...

...Pipping...

...and chicks!

These other guys are called Laughing Gulls, but they sure weren't happy to see us!

World's Oceans Day

Working at the New England Aquarium was really great! I ran a booth with the other intern that arrived that weekend (as mentioned in my previous post), as well as another visitor's services intern from a refuge nearby. We got to talk to a lot of different people, and we took turns going around to the other booths and learning what they had to say! Also, there were demonstrations going on throughout the day of cooking sustainable seafood, so we got to try lots of yummy snacks. Afterwards, we got to walk around the aquarium for free!

The view of Boston from our booth

Anemone

Cowfish!

Jellies

The flat guys...a flounder and some kind of skate(?)

Myrtle, the turtle they've had since the 1970s. She's huuuuge!

Here she is by another turtle for comparison. She was bigger than me!

Penguins! African (black band) and Little (no black band)

African penguin

I want this guy's job!

Sadly this picture didn't turn out, but I wanted to include the Rockhopper penguins!

"I'm a pir-ah-nah!" (If you don't know that reference...go watch Finding Nemo)

a pile of seahorses

Sea lions! they were so playful all day...until I went to take a picture

Boston has some really cool buildings!

We got stuck in "traffic" on the way out!