Today, it's just chicks, terns and LOTS of rain...

My 'turtle patrols' several days a week are my absolute favorite mornings. I love riding along the Gulf of Mexico, watching the sun lighten the day.



Pensacola Beach is kind of a hard run. Tire ruts make for a rough ride, and great hiding places for chicks.



I'm fairly certain these are the same Black Skimmers from yesterday.



The larger one tried to waddle away again. I think s/he is a little older.



As expected, their mothers and fathers flew circles to keep the big bad predator off the beach. As the chicks roam more, they protect an increasingly large area on the beach. Be aware if you're out roaming in the area -- they may aim for your head!



This was the only turtle on the beach today though. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a new nest...



At Fort Pickens, the Least Terns were out in force.



This tern was delivering a late breakfast... Yum -- dead raw fish!



This one seems a little angry at me, though there weren't any eggs or chicks around...



Or were they. They're often hiding in areas that we can't see. It makes driving the beach nerve-wracking as they can hide under or in anything!



I still didn't get pictures of the Fort. I had to quickly finish my hunt for snowy plover nests while dodging lightning bolts.



Maybe next week... This week has been so odd, with ribbons of rainbows, hail, lightning, torrential twenty minute rain storms, and turtle nests. I'll take all the rest if it means we have more turtle nests on the beach!

Full Moons and Plovers

It was a beautiful full moon last night and the tides this morning reflected that! The surf was up; partly due to a strong west wind, but that satellite of ours pulls on the oceans too. Even the blooming Spanish Bayonet were listing in the breeze.



Just to show my friends and family that this work can be hard, I'm including this photo of one of the nests that I located today. There is a female snowy plover here sitting on a four egg nest. Can you find her? She actually sticks out quite a bit.



She's a little easier to see here in an extreme close-up, from far enough away that she isn't scared off the nest (it's a hard balance).



She was not at all pleased to see my close proximity as I walked towards her to find her eggs. I don't like scaring them, but if we're going to close a section of beach, I need to know where the nest is so I close the right area. It's kind of hard to explain that to a plover, but I tell her anyway. Maybe she understands more than I realize.



After a few nest checks, they do seem to get used to us, and display a little less each time, knowing we'll soon back-off. I hope that doesn't make them less vigilant with other predators. This snowy had a relatively rare four-egg nest.



Some of her black-bellied plover (Pluvialis squatarola) cousins were hanging out in Spanish Cove, back in breeding plumage. Aren't they striking?



For some reason, bright yellow flowers always catch my eye, especially on the rather muddy expanse of Spanish Cove. It's a little sunshine even on a gray day :)



Tomorrow, we're doing a least tern/nest census on Santa Rosa -- again with the road construction question in the air. Apparently, the superintendent doesn't believe we have nesting birds. Strange. I hope to have time to work on turtle friendly lights too -- there's a lot of work to do before the hatchlings hit the beach! I need to study up in case anyone has hard questions -- maybe I should put a few turtle friends on speed-dial!

Pelican, Plovers and Hurricane Response

First thing thing this morning, Monica and I got a phone call from our SCA, Sally, about a brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) that was tangled in fishing line. We found this little beauty still along the edge of the breaking waves.



After removing two hooks and yards of line, we hoped the bird would fly, but he just didn't take off. Monica and I tried chasing it, but it would only run and flap and run and flap. Maybe that's how it got tangled in the first place.

Since the pelican can't eat if it can't fly, we boxed it up and took it to our good friends at the Wildlife Sanctuary -- they take lots of birds for us and do a great job getting them healthy enough to return to the wild.



It was a great start to a fantastic day. After dropping the pelican off, I spent the day at Perdido Key, putting up closures around tern nesting areas and checking on snowy plover (Charadrius alexandrinus) nests. This little guy had recently hatched, maybe even this morning -- the photo is from my cell phone, so it's not the best.



The plover family was kind enough to hang around while I got a real camera.



The parents were hyper-vigilant with their three young chicks.



You can see how tiny these guys are next the broken shells that litter the beach. They really are hard to find when they crouch down like that -- they just look like rocks!




Even the marked nests can be hard to find. On our three seven mile stretches of barrier island, we mark nests with simple foot-long sticks, painted yellow and numbered on top. A PK number is from Perdido Key, the others are SR (Santa Rosa) and FP (Fort Pickens); each series keeps a running count of the number of nests we have on that particular beach.



The nests themselves are small hollows in the sand we call 'scrapes'. The plovers line them meticulously with broken shells and get ready to lay and incubate the eggs for about three weeks. Sometimes the only way we know the plovers are still taking care of their eggs is if we see lots of plover tracks around the nest, like we do in this one. This nest hatched (it's the chicks and parents in these photos) so the reason for all the plover footprints is very apparent!



I didn't want to trouble them for too long, as stress for the small birds and young chicks can't be very good. If you look carefully, you can see the two parents and one chick among the ATV tracks on the beach here -- there really are too many ATV tracks here!



Around the point, this great blue heron, Ardea herodias, was on the lookout for a fisherman with a free meal. If you look really closely, you can see that his big feet hang off the edge of the piling. They really are enormous to help support the height and weight of the largest of our local heron species.



As I was finishing up with my surveys, a flotilla seemed to be leaving Pensacola Pass as the Blue Angels flew overhead. The seas were a little rough, and the skies getting gray, but it was a beautiful day in the National Park.



I almost forgot the hurricane part... At 5am, I opened my email to find that some crazy person decided to put me on the hurricane operational response team. I'm second team lead to my boss (if he's there) for resource management in the event of a tropical storm of some type this season. I guess I've done more before in the Caribbean, but it still gets me every time that we have to think about these devastating storms -- it's nice to live in denial sometimes!