Post 9: Letter from a turkey blind - The Last Islands Adventure

I started the week driving out at Green Bay national wildlife refuge off the coast of Door County, WI in lake Michigan with Jon Krupfl the biotech.  We had two goals, to observe the band numbers of cormorants on two islands in the refuge and to band more cormorants the following nights. The day started at around 2:30AM when we met up with folks from the United States Department of Agriculture Research Branch at the University of Mississippi.  A fascinating group made up of a few graduate students and two USDA research biologists.  We woke up so early to get to the island to reduce the amount of birds that leave their nests allowing the nearby gulls who are less afraid of humans who would break the eggs at nests that the cormorants were not guarding.  After running onto the stinky island we each set up a turkey blind on an existing scaffolding and hunkered down until 6am when we would begin our observations.  Armed with a spotting scope, binoculars, a walkie talkie, a poop bucket, and enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to feed an army I sat and waited recording the numbers as I went along.

During the day I couldn't help but admire the birds interacting together.  If you've ever been people watching in any public place, I tend to gravitate towards coffee shops, late nights at Denny's and boardwalks (being from Florida), you would love the ability to watch these birds.  Aside from the surrounding gulls, they have no idea you are there and they go about interacting amongst themselves in a fascinating manor.  The two species of birds (the herring gulls and the double crested cormorants) act so differently.  A seemingly slight majority of cormorants were sitting on their nests made of sticks no thicker than half an inch but often a bit longer longer than a foot for the majority of the day.  Often times they could be found "loafing"(terminology stolen from the data recording sheets we used) either near the shoreline or closer to the colony.  They would stand very still not moving a leg for long periods of time perhaps because their cumbersome bodies don't allow much movement.  Other observations include

• Herring Gulls would all be covering the area between the colony and the shoreline ~50 feet standing around but each gull a good 5 feet between it or and the next gull.
• Cormorants feed their young by regurgitating fish they caught
• It seemed they did this by allowing the young to stick its head into the elders mouth causing a gag action that would cause the contents of the elders stomach to be puked up to be snatched by the young
• Cormorants would be constantly standing with their heads tilted up at about a 15 degree angle with the horizontal
• perhaps due to the fact that juvenile cormorants to always be asking (by way of bothering the elder cormorant by bouncing their own beak against their elder) and the elders being really annoyed by it
• Cormorants nests were clustered usually about 1-2 feet apart often causing them to bark at other cormorants who seemed to be getting close to snatch some hard fought branches from their nest
• Herring gulls seemed to occasionally have a massive squacking battle as the elder white feathered ones would have territory invaded by younger brown feathered cormorants.  One territorial invasion would call for the sqacking of dozens or even hundreds of others in the area.

The initial plan had us packing up our turkey blinds and exiting the island at around 9pm or sundown to again avoid disturbing to many nesting cormorants.  We ended up leaving at around 3pm due to some bad thunderstorms headed our way which was fine by me.  We had hit the quota for the amount of bands we wanted to record and I was exhausted from sitting in the blind all day.

What a day!