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 :)

Cold feet... warm heart?

One thing I try to avoid while doing fieldwork is getting cold. It makes everything seem longer and more trying when you are cold. If you are warm, you can go all day in the winter and enjoy being outside. It's not so easy if your hands or feet are freezing.

On that note, I'm not sure why winter hikers for men and women are so different, but I can tell you that men's hikers seem to be made with much higher quality than anything I can get for myself. After working in snow for a month in 'winter' hikers (and consequently, freezing my feet for a month), I broke down and bought snowboots. Huge rubber bottomed leather topped boots with a removable liner - they showed promise.

I worked with the PhD student often, tracking squirrels all day in the snow. Me in my honkin' snowboots and him in his winter hikers. Me in huge overall snowpants and him in lined khakis with gators. Me in a huge winter jacket and him in a light raincoat. Me in a hat and him with a bare head. Basically I was dressed for a blizzard and he was dressed for cool fall weather. Guess who ALWAYS got cold and started to complain? Guilty as charged.

Besides his man hikers, the other thing he wore that I envied were a pair of long leather mitts. They were from Mark's Work Wearhouse and I developed a false hope that maybe, just maybe, they would carry them in an x-small or small. I finally broke down and dropped by Mark's after one extra-frosty day in the woods. I found the mitts and searched the sizes. Medium and larger... probably all sold out I thought to myself. So I found an employee and asked to get a pair in - apparently Medium is the smallest size. Who makes mittens from a M up? Men's mitten companies, obviously.

So, to date I have not found comparable products... but I keep the hope that I was not the only woman requesting comparable winter hikers and mittens, and that maybe that information will get passed on to the powers that be. Maybe then women can get some decent winter work clothing.

Do I have permission to trap?

Trapping on or near private land is always interesting. I trapped on both public land (which was surrounded by cottages) as well as in a private sugar stand. Both situations had their benefits (and disadvantages).

Trapping on public land that is so close to property owners means their interest is instantly peaked. And yes, informing the public about research is very important. But EVERY day, EVERY time you go to do field work having to explain yourself and what you're doing (until each individual resident is informed) can be a bit time consuming. You'd figure, with human nature, that word would get around about what you're doing and why you're there... And then there's the dog owners who think it's a great idea to follow your trapline with their dog as their afternoon walk (which is obviously conducive to catching squirrels).

On private land it's a bit easier, as you explain yourself to the owner once and that's taken care of. BUT neighbors like to keep an eye on each other's property, and then send the cops in to check it out if there's a vehicle they don't recognize on the farm next to them. I speak from personal experience. Luckily I was wearing my Trent University t-shirt and pink rubber boots, so I looked pretty harmless... and the cop was really only interested about how the turkeys were in the sugar stand (apparently he hunts them there - I assume when he's off duty).

AND then there's the men who stop (usually when I'm parked on the side of the road with my field truck, getting ready to track my squirrels or check my traps) to ask me if I need any help. Because a girl can't just stop on the side of the road and walk into the forest... she MUST be in distress.

Or the gas station attendant, who assumes I am harvesting the squirrels for their furs!?!?! Honestly, these things are smaller than chincillas.

But overall, I usually get along ok. I don't ever have to worry about having to replace a flat tire or being broken down. Someone will always stop. Somedays it's good to be a girl :)

Where flying squirrels go to count sheep...

I tracked squirrels to find their nest cavities, which I then measured (eg. volume, the direction the opening faces, opening area). Flying squirrels are secondary cavity nesters, which means they use cavities excavated by another species, such as a woodpecker.

A regular cavity looks like the one on the right. If you're lucky, once you track a squirrel to its tree you can hit the tree with a stick and a squirrel will either stick its head out of the cavity or actually run out and up the tree. If you're REALLY lucky, you may even get a glide right out of the cavity to another tree. That's always fun to see :) If you look really closely, you can see the nose of a squirrel towards the bottom of the cavity circle.

But then sometimes northerns shrug convention and do this to me. It's not new news that flying squirrels build leaf nests. It was just a little unexpected given the cold winter temperatures. Southerns do not even build leaf nests this far north. So when I stumbled upon my first nest, I thought it would likely be an outlier. But then I found more and more leaf nests...

So that brings us to this winter. This winter I collected several known leaf nests from last winter and deployed them with temperature loggers to look at the difference between outside (ambient) temperature and temperature inside the nests.

So far analysis of that temperature information shows that leaf nests are likely equivalent to tree cavities for buffering capacity. Stay tuned for more rigorous comparisons soon.

Winter gear: Just mush

The field site where I measured cavity temperatures was at a research property owned by Trent University. It is an old farm property complete with mature sugar maple forest. There is a gate and dirt road in the summer, but in the winter this gets snowed in, so you have to walk into (and around) the property.

To set up temperature loggers in the cavities I outfitted them with microchip detectors (to detect any flying squirrels that went into the cavity) and used a "treetop peeper" (camera on an extension pole) to check the cavities for any other small creatures that could be using them. This was to make sure the cavities were empty when I recorded temperatures, so that I was getting the insulating effect of the wood, not any heating effects of animals sitting on my temperature logger.

The microchip detectors had to be attached to large batteries, and the treetop peeper was stored in a large waterproof case, so getting gear in and out of the site was no easy task. Instead of carrying it all, the PhD student had the brilliant idea of taking a snowmobile sled, loading it with the gear and attaching the tree lanyard as a harness. Now getting all the gear in and out was a breeze... unless the snow was wet and sticky, which in that case it was still pretty difficult to pull the sled. BUT once you broke a trail, it was smooth sailing all the way back out.

Not to mention my legs were in excellent shape by the end of the winter!

Learning to climb

My research requires both inserting temperature loggers
into cavities and measuring the internal dimensions of cavities. Many of these cavities are out of a ladder's reach, which means we have to climb trees to measure them.

Yes, climb - not the free-climbing of your childhood, when you had not yet realized your own mortailty. This is the safety equipment riddled, muscle aching, uncomfortable climbing of adulthood - complete with spurs, harness, lanyards, helmet and rope.

I was taught to climb by two male students in my lab. Now I am dedicated to equality of the sexes, especially being a female graduate researcher and all, but they just make it look easy. The upper body strength of a rugby player versus my upper body strength (where my workout is carrying groceries home from the store) does not even compare. It's hard work, and I'm glad I did it in the winter (when you can never get too warm and there are no biting flies!).

That aside, it's pretty fun! And getting that high in a tree
offers a great view of the surrounding countryside! Once
you get comfortable and lean back, it's actually quite relaxing
(until you have to start climbing back down).

The scariest part is if you lose your footing. The lanyard and harness are there to slow your fall out of the tree, and turn it into more of a slide, but a very uncomfortable one at that. I know a person with scars going up his stomach from sliding down a large portion of a tree with the lanyard and harness attached.

You try your hardest to get a good footing, and stick the spurs in deep. There's no kicking involved, just stepping straight down on them and letting your body weight do the work. But every now and then a piece of tree flakes off (the piece with your spur in it) or the tree is just too frozen/hard to get your spurs in very deep. That's often when you slip. It's not that I'm afraid of heights, but I certainly am afraid of falling. There were a couple of times last winter that my spur slipped and my heart skipped a couple of beats (and it kinda felt like it left my chest and made a new home in my throat).

All in all, climbing is an interesting and challenging skill to have, and I am glad I learned it. Will I climb just for fun? Probably not... I still get the rugby player to climb "tough" trees for me :)

Trapping is an art best left for tall men

To trap flying squirrels, I mount brackets on trees and place tomahawk traps on top of the bracket. The higher the trap is on a tree, the more capture success it will have. Now picture your 6' co-worker setting traps as high as he can reach, and then sending me (5'4) to set them.

See the problem? I spent half of my winter trying to scramble up trees with traps totally out of my reach. And to put the bait in the trap (peanut butter on the little peddle that shuts the door once its stepped on), I need to be "face and eyes" into the trap.

After about the 6th time climbing a pine's dead lower branches and then sliding down the tree, getting stabbed by the nub left by the branch when it broke off on the way down, I decided I needed a step of some sort - and I choose a milk crate for that purpose, because it was light and sturdy. The milk crate was my sidekick all winter, giving me the extra height needed to set traps with ease.