Petit Manan Island National Wildlife Refuge (PMI)

I am still thinking about my time on PMI and am trying to think of a way to get back out there. I had the most fantastic time out there. It was peaceful and i got to band! so where is PMI from where I live? allow me to show you:

So I was to meet Linda Welch the US FWS person at their office at 0800 and we were to head out from there. It takes just over an hour to get to Milbridge, ME from Bar Harbor, so I left at 0650 to make sure I got there in time. which I got there at 0800, nice timing I thought. When I arrived Linda was not there just yet so I looked around the office and got my float coat for the boat ride out to the island. Linda arrived shortly after I got there. I followed her to the boat launch and put my things onto the boat. The trip out to the island took about 30-40 minutes. When I arrived there was a crew out there painting the house and one scraping the boat house in preparation for painting. Jim, the boat operator, lead this crew until 1400 painting and scraping.

I met the two women working the island as the banders, first was Pam:

and then there is Alison:

When I arrived Pam and Alison were in the middle of their banding day. I started immediately with helping them on net runs and banding birds. It was good to take a bird out of the nets again. Today continued another project, shorebird banding. Apparently they had been trying different methods to capture shore birds for the avian influenza study. They had tried a large bow net contraption that apparently did not work, unless you consider a slow motion trap a success. I will see if i can get the video they took of the net closing. The mist net was a success, easy to set up, not too many birds so the pace was not hectic. typically they would set net up for passerine banding 30 minutes before sunrise and band for six hours and start the shorebird net no more then an hour before the end of passerine banding. this was also dependent on tides. In the photo above the rocks you see are all covered during high tide, what you see here is low tide. the reason for waiting till high tide is that at low tide all the birds are dispersed over a large area. At low tide they are concentrated in small areas and with the proper placement of the net you can capture quite a few birds in a single run. The first day we captured Least Sandpiper, Semipalmated Sandpiper and a Spotted Sandpiper. the Songbirds were much less exciting, Savannah Sparrows dominated the nets. there is a resident population on the island so the majority of birds captured were of the SAVS variety.

I went for a walk around the island after the events of the day to see what I could, here are a few images from my first day and my walk.

 

 

Saturday was blur for me…I had a migraine and was not into anything that day. I took my pills and took a huge nap and woke up refreshed and ready to take on the night…ugh! I had to get up at 0450 the next day. Pam and Alison had made dinner that night and offered me some which was really nice because I was not in any mood to cook. Here are some images from Saturday, this is really the only way I kinda remember this day:

 

Sunday we got up at our normal time but the winds were at a sustained 15 mph. So we sat around staring a one another trying to stay awake. So I sat and listened to my iPod, which at this point was dangerously low.

***just a side note, I wasn’t told much about the living conditions before i got there so didn’t expect much. when i arrived they told me that there was power, solar, and that if i needed to charge anything that I could with no problem…If i had known that i could have brought my laptop too… Oh well maybe next time.***

it wasn’t until 1000 that the winds had died off enough for us to open the nets. so we headed out and got net up by 1030 and started banding. We ended up having a great day. that is until i fell of the stupid boat ramp and got soaked…although that was kind fun too especially since I didn’t hurt myself. I also climbed up to the top of the light house this afternoon it was pretty amazing view, here are the photos I took Sunday:

Monday was a copy of the other days, with out me falling into the ocean.  We did have quite the collection of shorebirds in the area:

• Willet
• Ruddy Turnstone
• Sanderling
• Semipalmated Plover
• Semipalmated Sandpiper
• Least Sandpiper
• Spotted Sandpiper
• Dowitcher
• Black-bellied Plover

Here are the photos from Monday:

I say this in one of the photos but I thought of the Circle of Life song every morning, here is something for the next few pictures

 

Tuesday – The original plan was for me to get picked up early from the island and head back to the main land so I could go to work. Well at 0930 we got a phone call that said they would be out around 1330. Well there goes that plan…I did get to enjoy another full day of banding…of course I didn’t get back to MDI until 2030. Oops, Guess I am not going to work today, LoL.

these are the last days sunrise, we were so slow that I got a great series:

 

and finally one thing that occurred the entire time I was there was a family of Peregrine falcons and a pair of Merlins kept harassing the shorebird population. the Peregrines were particularly vindictive, they would tail chase the birds until they almost had them and then break off from the chase. they would return several times a day and chase the flock. Kind of funny really. Well the Merlin landed one time and we took the time to stalk him and this is the best shot i could come up with:

Well I have been sitting in fonrt of this computer all day. I am ready to relax now. Miss everyone, I have less then a month till I am home.

 

And so we go…

Oh Yeah!

Oh yeah because I went to Petit Manan but more on that later. First let me start out by catching you up on what has been happening at work. I believe that the last time I updated you till the 28th of August so we shall start with the 31st of August…

on the 30th of August ‘Danny’ was supposed to hit but fell apart and basically all we got was rain. the week before we had ‘Bill” blow through. I mention this because my week started off with me heading down to Stanley Brook to see what had happened after the big rain we had. I don’t remember if I mentioned this in my last post (honestly to tired to look it up) but after ‘Bill’ came trough it basically filled up the antenna array with sand it was all but impassable. After ‘Danny’ came through it was completely cleaned out, and I mean CLEANED OUT! there used to be a sand bar that block half of the water way and sort of held up the water at the lower end of the brook. it is gone it is free flowing from bridge footing to bridge footing. That is a good thing. After this i headed to the west side to check on the pain in our collective asses a.k.a. Seal Cove Pond. It was still bad…both ponds were full again… the workers were putting things away for the day because the water was rushing through the middle of every thing. so there was no work going on there. I finally got back to the office and work on putting together some GIS maps for the Isle au Haut hawk watch for Bik who was leaving on Tuesday.

We saw Bik off this morning as he headed off to start the inaugural Hawk Watch on Isle au Haut. After Bik left  I worked on creating maps for our Big Beaver Census. The idea is that we will walk every watershed and conduct a full survey of the island to gain an idea as to the number of beaver living on MDI. Bruce and I started by heading out to one water way at Sand Beach. We walked down stream from an old fire road and found one family group area with activity. We stopped early and did not complete the up stream area. We came back to the office and had a strategy meeting on how to logistically complete the beaver census along with all the other projects we have to complete.

Today started with me creating a more field friendly beaver census data sheet. I went out with my roommates wife, Jen, and we surveyed two watersheds.

**Jen was working in Alaska for the summer on a Fish and Wildlife Service project with Pacific Salmon. She is now volunteering at Acadia with Bruce and she will now be a regular player.**

The survey was the entire day…Bruce accompanied us for the rest of Sand Beach drainage and then Jen and I went and did North Schooner Head road drainage.  I also found out today that I would definitely  be going to  to Petit Manan Island on Friday…I was SUPER excited. I will have a separate post for my trip to Petit Manan, it will be chock full of pictures.

Thursday arrived and we went out with a representative from Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IFW) a state agency. They have started a long term study site at a stream (brook, all Mainers call them brooks, whatever) called Lurvey Springs Brook. We electro-shocked from a culvert crossing to 150m downstream. It was pretty cool, we got the largest Brook Trout I had ever seen, most are around 4-6 inches this behemoth was 10 inches. We did three passes to ensure we had cleared the reach we were working. When we finished up with that in the late afternoon Jen and I headed back to HQ. When we got there Bik had just returned from IAH. We sat and talked to him for a while and to find out how the Hawk Watch went.

Bik did see raptors but not where we expected them. Every single Hawk seen was during his travels to get to the watch spot or on his ride back to the cabin. Even then he only saw five raptors, five different species but still not an encouraging number.

***The next five days were spent on PMI I will have a separate post about my time out there, I am going to pick this story up with the following weeks worth of work. Which as I write this is last week.***

September 9th to the 11th we electro-shocked Stanley Brook. Since I had missed a day of work because I was at PMI my week started on Wednesday, I was kind of wondering how I was going to make up those hours for Bruce. Well no problem there…I ended up on the plus side of things at the end of this week. we worked for three days, for a total of 34 hours. We started at 0700 every day and went till we couldn’t go anymore, which was right at 11 hours. Here are some photos (not my best to be certain) to show you the fish and what we do with them. It is like banding but with fish instead of birds.

 

**FYI, not sure if i had ever mentioned this but the info about pictures are embedded in the image, this means if you put your cursor over the image it will give you and explanation of the photo.***

 

was looking for a tie in with a knights tale, ‘you have been weighed, measured and found wanting.’

and that is what I did for the last three days. I did get to use the electroshocker, I find that I am better doing that then trying to catch the fish…especially with Bik around, he was mister trout slayer. typically Bik was the one who would catch fish, there would be a shocker and then me the bucket boy. let me give you an image, if you have ever seen History of the World Part 1 you will get this. Remember the French Revolution and the piss boy…that was me.

And so we go…

Expect a new posting soon about my PMI time.

Wow It has been a long time….

Sorry everyone who has been following. I realize that it has been a very long time since I last wrote anything, for that I am sorry. So a little about what has been going on, big broad strokes view.

Personally

– in the past three weeks Most of the people I came to call friends have left. Maddie was the first to leave, she headed back home and then on to school.

 

Next to leave were the ‘twins’ Mo and Bernadette, These kids were truly blessed in their lives. everywhere they went they brought smiles to peoples faces. I got to meet their parents before they left which was a great pleasure.

and finally Carrie, she was one of my roommates for a time, she is an interesting character this one. She left yesterday.

on Aug 19th I realized that i was starting to get sick. I actually had to take sick time on the 20th and 21st, which was fine since all I did was lay in bed and be sick. Saturday was a bit better I actually went out to Thunder Hole to see how hurricane bill was affecting it; pretty awesome.

Sunday, my birthday, was by far the worst day for wave action. at noon on the 23rd 20 people who were not listening to the ranger warnings to stay off the rocks were slammed by a rouge wave and seven of them were sucked out to sea. One seven year old lost her life to this tragedy and the father is not doing to well either. I don’t have any photos from Sunday but the waves were ENORMOUS!!! there is this one place called Otter Cliffs and the wave crash was doubling the height of the cliffs, which are about 40 feet tall.

 

Work

Wow where do I start, we have been busy for that last couple of weeks with a few projects. these are not in any particular order….except for maybe how much a pain in the ass they are.

 

Seal Cove Pond is a huge problem there is a dam at the south en of this pond that has been there for 50 years. the town of Tremont got a grant to put a fish ladder in to open up hundreds of acres of prime breeding habitat for Ale Wives, a type of halibut. This was great news! the problems started the day before the ground breaking began, apparently the build will be impacting some of the park lands. Well the people involved in this build failed to get park permission for impacting park property. The group came to David, my boss’s boss, and talked to him and told him what the project was and it all sounded great. A fish ladder would be installed and open up habitat yada yada yada…David asked the fateful question…when do you start the build…’tomorrow’ David was a little less then pleased with this. he ran around to everyone at HQ and got verbal acceptance of this proposal. the fish ladder group was a go! what a nightmare, the contractors that are on the job have never done anything like this before, they have put so much silt in to the stream with their construction plans it is ridiculous. They are also so far behind schedule that it will be impressive if they finish at all…they have had a ridiculous number set backs including coffer dams collapsing and excavators not reaching as far as they needed. After hurricane Bill both pools were full and it was like nothing had happened.  After the rain event it triggered a seaward migration of Ale Wives which were stuck upstream of the coffer dam. Bik and I went out to  Seal Cove and dip netted around 4000 fish and never made a dent in the population. There were no workers around for the hours that we were there and as we were getting ready to leave they all showed up. after some discussion it was finally decided to open the spill way up for the night and allow the water to flow and allow the most fish to migrate down stream.

We have a terrestrial amphibian study plot that is behind the local high school, during the school year between the local college and high school the data is collected. During the summer we collect the data and store it until school starts. We go out about twice a week and turn over these cover boards, there are five transects with ten stations and two cover boards each. It is interesting. On average we have seen about two salamanders each visit, not really sure if that is good or bad.

We are starting to have problems with beaver again but in a different location. There is a family that has moved into a location on duck brook road. Not a good area as far as humans go but really ideal if you are a beaver. We don’t have permission to trap yet and are not sure if we are going to receive permission. We are in a holding pattern as far as this project is concerned.

The next big project that we are working on is setting up a hawk watch on Isle au Haut. If you have been reading you all know were Isle au Haut is located and what it is. We have been discussing this possibility for a while. Last week we finally went out to Isle au Haut to scout out locations. We left the office around 8 in the morning and finally arrived at the island around 11am. We hiked from 11 to 3:30. We found a few places but one stood out above all others we called it out lunch break spot…because well we had lunch there. I will have my camera there when I go next and put some up of our location for watching. It is a pretty spectacular location and I can’t wait to go. I will not be going until the week of the 14th. Then I will go two weeks after that.

One last thing… A potential trip out to Petit Manan thislabor day weekend and go banding with fish and wildlife :) I will keep you up to date with this and take a ton of photos.

and so we go…

Hi all....I have not fallen off the face of the earth...I have been super busy and was sick this past weekend. I will start a post today but don't expect it before saturday...

Miss you all

J

Week of 3 August

I would like to start right off stating that I can’t fully remember what it was we REALLY did this week, I recall sitting around a lot and discussing what options we had on several of our short term and long term projects. We were also given the responsibility for a loon raft, this is a floating island where loons can nest…It is a fake island in essence. We also wandered around an area of Marsh for about an hour or two looking for beaver activity on ANP land. After much slogging around and searching this incredibly large area we found no lodge or other signs of beaver. Which means it is not our problem, yipee!

Management is starting to have doubts about moving as many beavers that we are suggesting, so there has been little done with beavers other then keeping an eye on where they are working.

GIS work – I have finally completed all the maps for the vernal pools (5) and the map for beavers (1). These have been printed and are going to hung around the building and used for field researchers when they arrive to find these locations. I fret that i missed something or that i put the wrong things in but Bruce loves them and is happy to have something he can work with.

Friday was a day of actual labor, we grabbed the fire team that was on and had them bring pumps to a pool constructed by Rockefeller at one of the carriage road bridges. It has been negatively impacted by the gravel that lines the roads of the park and from the carriage roads. this impacts the historical resource and the natural resource that this pool represents. We shoveled it out by hand for a few hours and until the dump truck was full…we were only half done…I think we will be headed back this week. I will hopefully get some of the photos that Maddie shot while it was being done.

there is one other portion of the Stanley Brook that is impacted by run off water from the town of Seal Harbor. We have some impoundments set up to allow the silt to settle out but they are filling up entirely too fast so we went out to set up further sitl fence lines to allow for more of the silt to settle out. we cut down dead wood and placed it in the way in an attempt to slow the flow down and allow for more settling. We shall see what happens with the next big rain and see if what we have done helps or hurts.

One final accomplishment that we achieved this week was completely taking seven years of data and transferring it into an electronic format (excel). it was supposed to have taken much longer but we spent so much time in limbo this week we worked on it every time we were sitting around. Bruce was really ahppy and surprised.

Well that is is it for this week. And so we go into another week of fun!

Catch up time

So lets go back to last Saturday; I volunteered to transport cars from Schoodic to MDI. The cars belonged to staffers of the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, Senator Susan Collins and the NPS director. It was minimal pomp and circumstance which was kinda nice. the Secretary was very engaged with the small presentations that were given concerning the money given to ANP by the government from the Reinvestment monies. after about an hour or so there I drove back an X-terra to the Visitor Center (VC). It was not a bad experience and I got paid overtime for it so it was nice. After I was done with that for the day I decided to go Hiking for the remainder of the day.

I decided to head out to Pemetic Mt. I figured since i had walked all the way around it that maybe I should go over it. So I did. It was a comfortable 4.2 mile hike up and down the mountain.

On the way up i found this cool waterfall coming don the side of the mountain:

and finally that night I went contra dancing with some friends at the local college:

This photo was taken by one of the girls from Schoodic, Twas a fun night of dancing.

Sunday was another day of hiking. I went up the West Face trail of Cadillac Mountain. It was a very treacherous hike that day because the mountain had not dried up from the last rain we had and it was foggy so it was getting wetter as the hike went on. I was supposed to go hiking with a friend that day but they bailed on me so I went by my self. Prolly not the greatest of ideas but I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be on the climb up. about halfway up this climb I started encountering folks who were turning around and headed back to the top because it was so bad. I did make it to the top of the trail but WHEW it was a nail biter. the climb down was not bad at all…I went a different way. when i reached the bottom of the mountain the clouds let loose and it poured on me the last two miles of my hike. Oh well I was headed home anyway.

I also applied to jobs which was the first half of the day. Hear is hoping that i find something before I leave here.

 

Monday, the first day of work was supposed to be spent climbing the Precipice Trail. Unfortunately it POURED rain and there was no way we were going up the mountain. so instead we worked inside for the first half of the day. I worked on GIS and creating metadata for some of the data layers that I created. around one when the rain had stopped and the sun came out we headed out to finish up some things we had left over from Friday.

Tuesday, Awesome day, Maddie and I got to hike the precipice to open the trail. It took us about an hour and a half to reach the summit of Champlain Mt. It was wicked HOT!, the cliff face is fully in the sun during the morning and let me tell you we both felt it by the time we reached the top. I had to take my uniform shirt off to cool off.

  As a side note this is the first picture of me that i have not taken myself.

For the rest of the day Maddie, Bruce and I collected our invertebrate bags from three locations before the end of the day arrived.

Wednesday, I finally got to go banding, we were target banding for Nelsons Sharp-tailed Sparrows. the researchers are looking at how mercury is affecting this marsh species of bird. Here on MDI is the ‘clean’ site and they have a ‘dirty’ site somewhere on the Penobscot river.  we finally caught five after setting the nets in a big line a flushing them into the nets.

 

When I was done with banding for the day I met up with the rest of the gang and we finished the Invert bags. and then it was time to head home.

 

Thursday, I spent the day in the field with a researcher who is looking a Dragonflies and Damselflies. We basically drove all over MDI and stopped at a ton of vernal pools and small ponds searching for exuvia, the shedding left behind after emerging into adult morph. It was an excellent day out with good sun. During the day Alyssa and I were talking about what it was she was looking for in these water systems. It came to light that I had seen Dragon flies at the top of every mountain that I had hiked. After some more conversation she was interested in visiting some of these sites. I mentioned several sites that met her criteria and told her to ask if one of us could help her again on Friday.

Friday,  It is Beaver Dam tear out day. We got to use the YCC (Youth Conservation Corps) kids to help us for the day. We hit the dams with a vengeance and had them  ripped out in about three hours of labor intensive work. It was rewarding to watch the water start flowing again. after that was complete I went out with Alyssa and we hiked out to one of the ponds at Cadillac Mt. We drove up Cadillac and Parked close to the South Ridge trail…My first time driving Cadillac…and hiked out. It was about a mile hike out, really short. we sampled the pond called the feather bed and started back up about a quarter of the way back we saw another pond and I asked Alyssa if she wanted to sample that one as well, she said yes. And so we headed back down and had to go off trail to get to it. We were finally done and headed out, we made the parking lot and decided to call it quits for the day. I headed back to HQ and found Bruce and he said call it a day. I did, I was exhausted for this weeks worth of work.

I am finishing this on Saturday the first of August, today I will be hiking most of the day and will probably going to a Contra dance tonight in Blue Hill. should be a great time.

One other thing i completed this week was my first monthly report for IES. After e-mailing Sandi, she said that I could use this four month job as my full internship.

And so we go, in to a week of undiscovered fun.