Some National Geographic Sh*t aka Eider Banding

In August I had the opportunity to help out with banding male eider ducks off the coast of Nova Scotia - this is some real National Geographic Sh*t! I'm not kidding, this type of field work is why I became a biologist in the first place!

Some background: Eiders are the largest ducks in the northern hemisphere. They have several stages of plummage and moult twice a year. Females raise the young without any help from the males. For more detailed information about the common eider, check out the Hinterland Who's Who site here.

This sets the stage for catching eider ducks to band. In late summer, males create large "rafts" offshore and moult their breeding plummage. For 2-3 weeks they cannot fly as they grow back their flight feathers. This is when we target them because otherwise they would just fly away as we approached.

This is where it gets exciting. It's a big operation, including a fishing boat, two zodiacs and a helicopter. The helicopter flies to find the rafts, which can be seen from the air. Then the helicopter radios the fishing boat, which travels to the rafts (you can spot them on the water once you get in the vicinity).

Raft of ducks

Once the fishing boat finds the birds, the zodiacs deploy with two people each. They stay ~180 degrees from each other and circle the eider ducks, forcing them into a tight cluster.

Circling the ducks

Once the ducks are in a dense group, the helicopter flies over the fishing boat and zodiacs, and a gunman (harnessed to the helicopter) shots a net gun into the group, efficiently netting the birds. Each net is packed with an inflatable tube, which is triggered by water. Once the net inflates, a zodiac sweeps in and the person in front drags the net of birds into the boat. The birds are then brought to the fishing boat for processing.

Netting the ducks - they learn fast and start to dive!

On the boat the birds are untangled from the nets and packed into fish crates to await processing. Processing includes sexing (99% are male but you get a few immature females too) and banding birds, which are then released. The aim is to process as quickly as possible so the birds don't spend too much time out of water.

Picking birds from the net

We can learn a lot about eiders by banding them. Duck bands that are recovered elsewhere in the world can tell us what locations they migrate to and their flight paths. Age can also be derived from bands, some of which have been found 20+ years later!

My first banding!

Needless to say, it was an exciting two weeks, and I look forward to helping again next year :)

The states finally got something right!

And those things are USGS Webinar Courses for Natural Resource Managers. The United States Geological Survey has a "Status and Trends of Biological Resources Program" which is a great source of information for any biologist, especially those working in academia or government.

The courses are free, all you have to do is register for them. You can watch them live through an online webinar window, which is great because you can also ask questions at the end of each webinar. If the timing of the webinar is inconvenient, you can also watch the recordings at a later time - and all slides/notes/data are provided!

Upcoming courses are listed on the website (link below) - and many of them have been done before, so you can even review the notes before the course starts to see if the topic is one that will be useful to you. I've already completed the "Modelling Patterns and Dynamics of Species Occurrence" course, and am currently signed up for the "Learn R By Example" course.

You can access the website and register for courses here.

Care to go WAPing?

The first opportunity I had to do some fieldwork with my new position came about due to an agreement between Regional Services and the Wildlife Division. Due to staff changes, the Wildlife Division became responsible for checking a portion of the Regional Service's WAP (Wood Acquisition Program) submissions from private woodlot owners.

These WAP submissions indicate whether the wood buyer practiced silviculture or planted saplings on privately owned lands. It is Regional Service's responsibility to go out and check the sites (they are provided with maps and GPS coordinates). Sounds simple, right?

1. Go to site.
2. Check site for silviculture or saplings by counting trees on a grid centered on the affected site.

Piece of cake! Except...

Most forestry technicians do these in the fall, after the ferns die off, or in the spring, before everything (i.e. ferns and thorny plants) grow up. The technician who trained us to check these sites was incredulous at the thought of us doing them at the height of summer. He suggested it was as close to hell as we were ever going to get, and he wouldn't even consider doing them himself.

Both of which I was really glad to hear before we ever got started. There was an end-of-the-month deadline, so delaying them was not an option.

So we travel to the field camp (which is a fire station in central NS - great lodgings!) and got to work.

Calling it hell was being nice. I have never experienced something so awful as trudging through chest deep brush from a thinning operation, all the while getting dive bombed by horse flies that can bite through jeans. Or struggling through 6-ft tall trailing thorn vines, which wrapped around you and dug into you through jeans. Or pushing through thick, thick regrowth only to disturb a wasp's nest and get stung (5 times, through jeans). See a pattern?


The above image is me at one of our first sites... All geared up with my 1m measuring stick. I was still enjoying it at this point. That didn't last long.

Between the heat, the sweat, the blood, and the exhaustion, we managed to get the WAPs completed before the deadline. And now that I know what doing WAPs is all about, if the same opportunity comes up next year - the summer students can have at'er (unless it's in the spring, of course - then I'm game) :P

Back at it!

So it's been a loooong time since I wrote about science... that's because I was doing a bunch of short contracts, and none of them had little, if anything, to do with biology (or fieldwork). Luckily, all that has changed!

I submitted my thesis to my thesis committee at the beginning of December and ran off to Australia to explore while my committee did their thing. I got back in January, completed revisions, submitted in January and defended in February. I cranked through revisions, got my thesis in by the March 1st deadline and got back 1/2 of the winter semester's tuition. Whoot!

Andrea, Master of Science. It has a nice ring, don't you think?

Shortly thereafter, I applied for an internship with the provincial government of Nova Scotia. I interviewed (and was very sincere about my desire to work in wildlife management) and got the job! My specific position is "Population Ecologist", and I'm responsible for modelling population dynamics from harvest data for furbearers and large mammals. This information will help guide management decisions.

I also get to help out with the other programs, and assist with fieldwork when people need help... so I have interesting things to talk about again :D I'll save them for another post, but I'll leave you with a picture of one of the first places I helped out with some fieldwork (a pond near some cut overs).