We are back from our nine day stay at camp for nest island monitoring. We managed to cover a lot of ground on the delta last week, travelling to about 380 nest islands. Since we weren’t actively searching for more goose nests, most of the travel we did was in our poke boats. We traversed many miles of beaver sloughs, jumped beaver dams left and right, and dragged our boats through plenty of treelines.
The beginning of the trip started off with rainy weather, but it wasn’t all too bad as we had plenty of work to do to keep us warm. It was interesting to check out some of the bigger ponds in the delta, as they contained species like horned grebes, red-throated loons, and trumpeter swans. We began to hear birds such as yellow warblers, gray-cheeked thrushes, alder flycatchers, and even western wood-pewees, which we haven’t heard all season. We paddled up on moose, annoyed plenty of beavers, and saw a handful of bears.
Nest Island monitoring consists of us going out to each island to determine if these artificial structures need maintenance or had been used by breeding dusky Canada geese, and if so, try to deduce if they were successful or depredated. During monitoring, we inspect each island to see if they have good shrub growth and shrub cover, and record other factors like pond depth, distance to shore, and species use. We ranked the priorities of how much work each island needs during monitoring. Low priority islands may only need some extra shrub cover, while high priority islands may be on the bottom of ponds or have gotten destroyed by muskrats and beavers.
Nest islands were implemented in the 80’s to provide additional nesting habitat for the geese and help decrease the rate of depredation by terrestrial predators such as brown bears, wolves, and coyotes. Nest islands help improve the nesting success of dusky Canada geese, but as you can see below, they don’t completely eliminate terrestrial predators from the equation!
We continued to look for Aleutian tern colonies during monitoring week. Aleutian terns nest along the coast in Alaska and have small colonies here on the copper river delta. We have been observing a few colonies within our study area, doing point counts, searching for nests, and recording what other species are using the area. One of the nests we placed a trail camera on hatched as well, so it was exciting to get that data, and of course, see a baby Aleutian tern.
Delilah, our camp goose, had a successful nest! Some species of waterfowl will select nesting sites near other species like jaegers because they are good at chasing predators away. Maybe that’s why Delilah chose to nest so close to us! From the pictures below, you can see how close she was to our cook tent! We were all impressed how we didn’t drive her away the whole month.
Next week we will be going out for nest island maintenance and to check the remaining nest fates of the late nesting dusky Canada geese we have. The weather has been amazing in Cordova lately and it looks like the sun will continue to shine on the delta this week! Looking forward to getting back in the field.