Since joining the team at Horicon I've made three trips to the Islands Refuges that we also manage. The islands refuges are located off of Door County, WI in Lake Michigan very near to Green Bay. On the mainland we usually stay in a small town called Sister Bay which has under 1,000 residents which is about a four hour drive from our refuge.
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| Plum Island |
I took the first islands trip with Christina, another intern, and Ashley a visitors services staffer. We went to Pirate and Gravel islands with Sumner Matteson and an old college of his. Sumner was an avian ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and he was doing research on Caspian turn colonies on the islands and we were to help him survey the nests and count the eggs. We split into two groups of two and split each island with caution tape. Each pair had a (nontoxic) paint gun and notebook as one would shout out the numbers of eggs in a nest and the other would record the data.
My favorite part of the trip was our ability to watch the different birds (caspain terns and herring gulls) interact. The required far more personal space than the terns and often squacked at other birds. The terns on the other hand were far more civil, standing or sitting on their nests, not moving much, and certainly not saying a whole lot. The behavioral differences between the two highlight the fact that birds, like humans seem to have cultural differences depending on population.
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| Plum Island |
The second trip to the islands was a single day trip with John Below, the law enforcement officer. I had gone up with John to support the guides who were giving public tours of our islands at Green Bay NWR. For this assignment I had to read the Comprehensive Conservation Plan or CCP on Green Bay NWR. It was a fascinating read, learning about the mute swans who were breeding with trumpeter swans. This was bad for the trumpeter swans who only recently came lost their "endangered" status because these hybridized swans were incapable of producing offspring. Otherwise it was great to be able to work on a visitors services project and learn about Jon who had been a peace corp volunteer in Jamaica, the country where my parents were born. I learned quite a bit talking to him about working with people especially working across a cultural divide.
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| Plum Island |
This most recent trip was by far the most exciting. A far larger group of us, nearly half the refuge staff including Brad and Shawn from fire, Hallie and a volunteer from visitors services, and Sadie, Rachael, Jon, Christina and me from biology. Our team had three different objectives but the exciting part about the trip was that we were going to be camping on plum island which was totally removed from society. No running water or electricity, let alone grocery stores and gas stations. Since we had such a large team and an equally large amount of gear we had taken two trips onto the island by boat.
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| Back-Country Camping on Plum Island |
The big trip's objectives was split essentially along department lines. The biology was to assist the double crested cormorant observation crew visiting the islands from the USDA. Unfortunately a heavy fog stopped us from participating in the cormorant observation but it gave me a chance to work with the fire crew on their objective to build a trail for visitors. Trails typically work entails clearing brush, anything from downed trees to those still standing so that people won't get lost along the route. We did this work on Plum island which was virtually untouched by human hands but was large enough to support a vibrant ecosystem. The trail covered the southern coast of the island and it was beautiful to be working along the steep bluff carved out by the centuries. The visitors services team, set out to plot a trail on another part of the island and find spots to put up interpretive signage.
Weeks ago, when I found out I was going to Horicon for the summer I went google crazy. I sifted through the internet for hours figuring out what Waupun, WI was. But all of the Google Street View and Wikipedia articles coudn't prepare me for what life is like in rural Wisconsin.
On top of all this, I've made god friends with Dan at the Family Video and Kevin at Chang Jiangs the local chinese restaurant. I have enjoyed living in small town America, where numerously the vast majority of cars on the road are in fact American brands and everybody seems to now almost everyone.
It sounds like a band doesn't it? Well Sumner is actually an avian ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and a pelican is actually a type of bird. A few weeks ago during the air boat component of a waterfowl survey we noticed that a massive colony of pelicans had left their marsh island nests. Me, Jon, Ashley(visitors services), and Sumner had the opportunity to take the air boat onto the refuge and survey some pelicans. Armed with tally counters and chest waders we descended upon the small island counting nest after empty nest. We found pelican egg shells littered all over the place without a pelican in sight. When we arrived at the end of the island we noted that it in fact was only separated by a very shallow bank which would allow a predator to cross easily explaining the abandoned colony.
Flash forward a few weeks later we did a nest count of another more isolated island on the refuge and found hundreds of nests with pelicans to accompany them. Good news, the pelicans seem to have renested and this years population numbers are saved!
