A week

Birding at Raccoon Creek State Park

 It is a week until I leave the country, and what have I been up to?

• Reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Birding
• Duck Banding

Pretty fun! The Hobbit was a recommendation from a coworker from Shaver's Creek. He said I would like it because of the adventure.

In the birding world, I am tied for 11th place in Allegheny county.
http://ebird.org/ebird/top100?locInfo.regionCode=US-PA-003&year=2012&locInfo.regionType=subnational2 (will change as time goes on).

Lastly, I visited Abby doing her job for the Game Commission, tackling deer and banding ducks. Unfortunately no deer, but definitely some ducks! 

I am still waiting on my visa. It has to come this week, or I will not be able to leave the country. I hope it comes this week, either wise it means changing my plane ticket.

Where I will be staying is still a mystery. I have a feeling that I will be staying with my professor, probably in the attic. Then I could be called the American in the Attic!

Abby and I duck banding

Camera Crazy

Song Sparrow

Too many buttons! Too expensive! Too hard to use!

That is what I thought about those fancy cameras. I was very content with my point and shoot Canon. Then, my camera died. So with my camera non-operational and with my up coming studies in South Africa, I decided to get one of those fancy cameras.

I got the Canon Rebel T3, as recommended to me by a few people. It cost almost as much as my plane ticket to South Africa! Needless to say I am going to keep good care of it. After charging the battery and reading all the manuals (yes it came with more than one), I went to the field with it.

With my 75-300mm lens, I captured some moments of a Song Sparrow's life. I noticed that while trying to get a good picture, I watched to bird more intently, paid closer attention to behavior, and loved the feel of wildlife photograph!

Song Sparrow foraging in the garden.

Vultures and Albatross'?

Everyday I have been reading journal articles. Some are sent to me from my professor I will be studying with, others I just stumble upon. This one was a great find!

It is from The Auk October 2011 titled  Estimating Survival and Life-Stage Transitions in the Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) using Multistate Mark—Recapture Models authors Eric A. VanderWerf and Lindsay C. Young. http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1525/auk.2011.10285

It caught my eye because life-stage transitions is a subject I studied in school in a wildlife class, as well as something I may have to study with the Cape Vultures. It breaks up the population into different stages (ie juvenile, immature, and adult) in regards to age. And this study added another stage called skipped breeding.

Albatross nesting cycle can be so long that a breeding bird must skip the next breeding season! Hence why they added a life-stage of skipped breeding!

These birds are similar to the Cape Vultures in that they have high adult survival, low fecundity, aggregate in large groups, and are long lived. Also their main threats tend to be humans. For vultures it is collision with power lines, for albatross' it is being killed as by-catch in fishing operations. Reading about their observation techniques as well as model creation is helpful in giving me ideas with my study.

Other gems in this study included the toll on the colony during WWII. A colony on Midway Island during the war experienced a decline in the population. I hadn't thought about the causalities the earth has during human warfare.

Another gem is the high occurrence of female-female pairs in the albatross colony. The sex ratio is the colony is skewed towards females, and due to the number of potential suitors females paired with each other. Some had viable eggs due to 'extrapair copulations'.  Very interesting!