Project Puffin: News from Eastern Egg Rock
Three of the four Egg Rock crew members prepared for census day 3! Photo courtesy of: Kate MacNamee
Three of the four Egg Rock crew members prepared for census day 3! Photo courtesy of: Kate MacNamee
Sometimes the terns just push you to the edge When she needs somewhere to think Island Supervisor Catherine Pham knows just where to go. Outer Green Island is a place where jagged and craggy edges of rock drop straight off into the ocean. Here the sharp calls of the tern colony can be drowned out
With the abundance of Cow Parsnip growing on Outer Green Island, the Project Puffin seabird biologists have to be creative with the few open spaces left to them. On this unused tent platform the interns have rigged up a super-mini-golf course using whatever found objects the could gather. Watch out Tiger. Photo Courtesy of Kaitlyn
As the breeding season progresses, the terns become more and more aggressive toward intruders, divebombing researchers who are trying to do counts on the nests and chicks. The terns will ceaselessly peck at their heads, try to shoot excrement on them, call out in a cacophany of sound designed in hopes of warding them off.
There is a constant struggle with the invasive plants on the Project Puffin islands. Beach pea, jewel weed, cow parsnip, these are just a few of the plants that are overrunning the islands and turning the bare rock that is ideal tern habitat into a matted tangle of weeds. Yet on Pond Island there is