Banding PEFA Part Duex

I have to start by saying that I LOVE my job!!! My boss is great, the ‘work’ I do is time consuming yet rewarding and I am continually astounded that I was selected for this appointment. I have now ‘worked for seven days straight, Saturday and Sunday were only partial days but still I worked.

Yesterday was an easy day, thus the reason I am rolling it into this report. Bruce wanted me to go on an orientation field trip for some history on the park. It was a really interesting trip. Donna if you are reading this you are right the geologic history is incredible in this area, we talked a lot about the glacial erratics found around the park. This trip lasted most of the day. When i got back to the office Bruce wanted me to check on the status of a nesting loon on Upper Hadlock Pond, so I did. Found it on the east side of the lake just sitting there in a bowl nest. Bruce wanted me to also check on the Eagle Lake nest but by the time I was passing by where i would turn in to see it it was getting late and I know Bruce is concerned by how much I was working so I went back to HQ and checked out for the night.

Today I got to work at 0800 and Bruce was waiting for Chris to arrive at 1000 so we could determine whether to not we were going out to Beech Cliff to band. We also had some work to do on the fish monitoring equipment. We decided that we should wait, it would take several hours to complete the fish work which would put us past the time Chris started and we didn’t want to miss him. I was tasked with organizing three years of loon observation data and consolidate it into smaller folders that were more easily managed. By the time I completed this task Chris was there and we where headed out to Beech Cliff, Banding was on!

This is what the site looks like:

The first time the Adults took notice of us was not until 1230. It took Chris quite a bit of time to make it to where he was safe and tied in to begin the procedure. From the nest side we set up a guide rope tide on to the cliff and then we wrapped it on a Birch tree for the lower anchor point. then slid the chick in a bag that was attached to the guide rope down to my location. From there we lowered the guide rope to retrieve the bag and start the banding process. there were a total of four chicks at this nest. Two female and two male ranging in age from 22 days to 25 days, approximately. I got a few images of the chicks.

By the time we were done with banding today it was time for us to head back to HQ and time for me to go home. I will sign off with that and write some more tomorrow… Hopefully the day that I get my internet, I say hopefully because i did not get my package today with the router. I was told it would be at the house before the technician arrived. Whatever, guess phone and cable companies are the same everywhere.

 

See ya!