2018 Field Season Summary

So... field season was wayyyy busier than I'd anticipated and I was way more tired at the end of the days, which is why there were no updates. And now, I'm holed up in a Super8 with internet and tons of time, so here we go.

View from the cabin porch

Boat ride from the marina

Cranberry Lake is lovely. The biological station is kinda like a tiny college campus: several small dorm-ish cabins for students, several classroom cabins, a laboratory cabin (mostly for us), several private cabins for professors and their families and for us, a 'lodge' with several private bedrooms and a common bathroom/shower area for the TA's (and sometimes us), a caffeteria, an office, and a 'quad'. There is also a small marina, a physical plant for our electricity, and a swimming area with a dock. Our cabin was away from the main campus just a little, which meant it was quiet at 8:00pm when we were trying to go to bed. Zoe and I lived in the cabin, and Eric (our field assistant) lived in the TA lodge (along with a chipmunk who's apparently been squatting there for ages). We had electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, and wifi, but no A/C (we had fans) and no central heat (wood-stove instead).

Our cabin

Kitchen area

Living room area

A lot of my pictures are on my actual camera and the cord is in a box, so I'll add those photos later. I do have some from my phone which, if you're on Facebook, you may have already seen. You can click on the pictures to see larger versions of them. 

General field area

Close-up of the biological station. The blue dot is the cabin.

The forest around the biological station has been divided up into territories occupied by White-Throated Sparrow pairs year after year (this is the 30th year of the project, so these territory areas are very well-established). The closest was about a 20-minute walk, the farthest was about a 50-minute walk (from the cabin). Our days consisted of visiting a few of these territories each day (so that each territory was visited every few days unless something exciting was happening) and monitor the behavior of the resident pair, mostly for the purpose of finding their nest. Once the nest was found, it was checked every couple of days until hatching, after which it was visited every day and the chicks measured. When the chicks were 6 days old, we banded them and took blood for genetic analysis (mostly to determine morph, sex, and parentage, none of which can be determined by looking at the chicks). The banding consisted of a USGS band with a unique 9-digit number (the same ones that are used in every US banding project), and 3 plastic color bands in a unique combination. The color combo allows us to tell individuals apart at a distance, whereas the 9-digit number can only be read if you have captured the bird and have it in-hand. The other outcome is that the nest fails for some reason. Usually this means that something ate either the eggs or the chicks (rodents, snakes, hawks, etc.). This happened A LOT this year. It also could mean that the female abandoned the nest to start over, usually during the egg stage. If the nest fails, it's time to watch the pair some more and find where they build the new nest. Pairs will keep up this cycle until they are forced to stop and fatten up for migration. Pairs have time to successfully fledge 2 (maybe 3) clutches during the breeding season. However, since many of the pairs had their nests eaten at some point during the process, we were having to find clutches 4 and 5 for some pairs.

Here was a typical day for us:
4:45 - wake up, get dressed, have coffee and breakfast, pack backpack, fill water bladder, grab snacks
5:30 - out the door
6:00 - 6:15 - arrive in first territory (depending on how far away it is)
6:00 - at least 6:45 - watch and listen, find the pair, follow them, try to find the nest. Here's an example of how that might happen.
6:10 - male sings for a few minutes from a tree
6:15 - female calls from somewhere nearby, male responds
6:20 - female joins male and they forage together for a bit
6:30 - male flies off and resumes singing in a tree
6:35 - female flies to a tree nearby and then drops to the ground
6:40 - we approach the area around where she dropped, female flushes up to a tree above the area and chips, male joins her and also chips (kind of alarm calls that signal they are agitated, usually means that the nest or fledglings are close by)
6:42 - nest found on the ground at the base of a bush, 5 eggs in it
6:45 - nest is documented, nest area is blocked off with flagging, biologists do various undignified happy-dances
7:00 - arrive in 2nd territory of the day. Here is also how this could go:
7:05 - 7:15 - male sings in a tree
7:20 - unknown contact calls from somewhere nearby
7:25 - 7:35 - male sings in a tree
7:35 - 7:50 - male sings in a different tree
8:00 - frustrated biologist leaves after pleading with the male to just point us to his baby-momma already. "Just show us your nest and we'll leave you alone, promise!!"
8:05 - arrive in 3rd territory of the day. Here is the bad-luck way it could go:
8:50 - no activity whatsoever, no WTSP's seen or heard. Blue Jays loud and obnoxious, Brown Creepers pretending to be WTSP contact calls. Common Yellowthroats rustling around in the bushes pretending to be WTSP's rustling around in the bushes. Also deer. And their flies.
The rest of the morning goes like this. There might be some active nests to check at the end of the day, maybe some nestlings to measure.
12:00 - return to the cabin
12:30 - arrive at the cabin, take the afternoon temperature, change clothes, eat lunch

Sewed a button back on

Added a belt loop to help hold my too-big pants on

Afternoon activities consisted of data entry, naps, clothing repair, reading papers, Netflix, reading not!papers, swimming, or showers (or some combination of several of these activities). We also, very occasionally, like once or twice a month, went across the lake for the afternoon for groceries or for ice cream. Ice cream was earned if we found 4 nests in a single day. It happened three times, once while I was there. Afternoons in town usually also involved getting lunch somewhere.

My first Great Lake: Lake Ontario, from Sacket's Harbor.

5:00 - whoever's turn it is to make dinner begins preparations. Most of our food was either dry, canned, or of the root-vegetable variety, so we had to get a little creative with the cooking.


6:00 - dinner time, sometimes accompanied by watching part of a movie. They watched all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies before I got there. We made it through all the available Star Wars movies toward the end of the season, 40 minutes at a time.

Field pasta salad

7:00 - debrief and next day's assignments. Zoe had to record all the major things that we saw and any nests we found. Based upon that information and any other active nests that needed to be checked, she assigned which territories were to be visited the next day.
7:15 - dishes and post-dinner cleanup by whoever didn't make dinner
8:00 - think about going to bed
8:30 - actually get ready for bed

All of this changed in late July when we switched from nest-finding mode to GPS mode. Every time we saw a behavior of some kind, we wrote it on red flagging and tied it to whatever was handy. At the end of the season, all of these flags (1000-2000, depending on the year) need to be GPS'd. These GPS points can be used to figure out what areas of the territories are being used, as well as a bunch of other cool spatial things (this is where my GIS brain goes nuts). Since we had one GPS with a good 8-hour battery and one GPS with a finicky 2-3 hour battery, we GPS'd in 3 shifts. The early shift would GPS for about 5 hours with the big-battery unit, starting at 5:30. The late shift would arrive around 9:30, grab the GPS and work for about 5 hours. The middle shift would GPS
with the little-battery unit until it died, hike back to the cabin to charge it for about 2 hours, then hike back out and GPS again until the late shift person is done or until the battery dies again, whichever happens first. If there was an extra person, they would hike around and find the flags while the GPS person waited for the points to load. It was a pretty efficient system, and we got done a few days early. We left Cranberry Lake mid-morning on August 8th instead of the 10th. We would have left on the 7th, except we had one last nest of chicks to band on the 8th.

That's it for now, as far as the season is concerned. When I get the pictures from my camera, I'll do another post explaining some of the areas. I'll also do another post explaining why I'm at a Super8 instead of moving into my new house.