Bear in camp, thoughts on bears

Sloth Bear, Sri Lanka

Last night we had a bear visit camp. Ryan spotted the bear from his tent as it approached camp. When it got close to camp he woke the rest of us up. I was actually listening to the Ting Tings in my headphones when Ryan opens up my tent door and alerts me to the bear. Thank god I wasn't doing anything more intimate! I didn't respond to Ryan's yells, so he had to take a more direct approach. I arrived at the cabin and saw Brandt and Tom outside with shotgun and rifle at the ready, and Ryan with his bear spray. I joined the search party and we jumped in the mud motor, which is a very load weedless boat engine and went down the shore of the lake a hundred meters to where the bear was last seen. Brandt revved the engine to move the bear away. The marsh blue top grass that grows here is about chin high so only Tom standing on the bench was able to see the bear's ears and top of head as it bounded it away. Ryan thinks it was a cinnamon phase black bear a sit was small. However Ryan has no field experience with grizzlies and the Alaska Fish and Game guys, who study pike in the area, saw a small grizzly a few miles away last week. After a little while we returned to bed. We sleep with bear spray and some of us firearms and we keep food and toiletries out of our tens, so we have little to worry about. Although interior Alaska has it's share of bears, we are in the middle of a mosaic of lakes, rivers, bogs, marsh and patches of boreal forest and therefore the bear population is very low.

I was disappointed I didn't see the bear. I've never seen a grizzly or brown bear (same species) and am am really hoping to see one while in Alaska. I've seen polar, black and sloth bears in the wild but as of yet no grizzly. I included a picture of sloth bear I saw in Sri Lanka, as I had no picture of our camp's visitor.

I visited Sri Lanka during my band's second tour of Asia in 2006. We didn't play in Sri Lanks, we just visited there for a week. I arranged a two day safari for the band to Yala National Park. I'll post more about this later... but Yala is an amazing wildlife spectacle. It's on the dry side of Sri Lanka in acacia scrub. It is famous for its leopards and elephants. We had a fantastic trip, seeing 100 species of birds, elephants, sambar and axis deer, wild boar, mongoose, and jackals, after we spotted the slot bear on the side of the road our guide turned around and said, "I have nothing left to show you".

I've seen 3 of the 8 species of bear. Grizzly will put me half way there. Although I doubt I'll ever see the last four. Asiatic Black and Sun bear are hard enough, but from what I understand Panda and Spectacled Bear are almost impossible. I wonder who in the world, if any has seen all eight?

Mew Gull Lunch

Sorry, could not get a photo of this. While boating on "Wacky Duck" lake we heard the mew gulls all up in a commotion. I scanned the sky looking for the raven or bald eagle that usually evokes this response. I was excited to see a juvenile peregrine falcon was the culprit. I've only seen one other peregrine the whole time I've been up here. The only birds of prey we see are harriers, bald eagles and short-eared owls. I'm surprised I haven't seen more raptors. When I glassed the falcon I could see a gull chick struggling in it's talons. I know it's a bit morose, but I love seeing predation in the field.

What's funny is that when a predator takes eggs from a nest it is termed "depredation", then why aren't predators called "depredators"?

Web Tagging

When we find a nest with hatching ducklings or when we catch ducklings by driving them into a net or with a dip net we will "web-tag" them. A web tag is a small monel metal tag with a four digit number that is attached through the webbing of a ducklings foot. We do this because ducklings under a certain age cannot be banded yet. We gain valuable data about these ducks movements and for our research survival relative to avian influenza infection. It's pretty awesome to get to handle these unbelievable cute duckings, but it can be stressful because of trying not to injure them. It's also a bit unnerving and messy when you web tag a hatching ducking just breaking out of the egg. When a ducking begins to hatch it it referred to as "pipping". Let me tell you, pipping ain't easy.

Moose in Camp

We have moose in camp regularly. Despite their huge size, they often slip by unnoticed in our sleep and all we see of them is their poop in the morning. It is pretty cool when we have a moose, always cows so far, come through camp. One knocked down Tom's clothesline. Another moose woke Brandt up in his tent, when he looked outside the moose was right up against his tent platform facing away, he reported that all he could see was a giant moose vagina filling his entire field of view. We've had at least two different momma moose in camp one with a single calf and another with twins. The twins were licking our solar panel support beams. I've named the most regular moose, a calf-less female, Jolene. She's a real beauty despite not having auburn hair nor eyes of emerald green.

"Spooner Face"

Nest Trapping

After we discover a nest and determine that it is of sufficient age and depending on if we have a fecal sample etc, we will put a trap on the nest. This is called a "Weller" trap after that famous waterfowl biologist who invested the trap. The trap consists of a welded wire cylinder with a top that sits over the nest, the hen trips a treadle entering the nest that depresses a trigger rod holding up a trap door. The trap is staked down. This way the hen can incubate the eggs until she is processed and released.

Upon capturing the hen we band the bird, do an oral and cloaca swab for avian influenza, weigh her,and measure the wing chord, tarsus and head.

This was the first time I was able to handle a northern shoveler as we didn't have any hens to use during decoy trapping. Apparently it is very difficult to keep shovelers in captivity and especially hard to keep the hens healthy as use as decoy birds. Shovelers have a difficult diet to replicate. They use that amazing bill to sift through mud and water for small organisms. Check out that amazing bill!

Horned Grebe Attack

After Ryan releases a horned grebe that got caught in a decoy trap, it repays his kindness by trying to spear him.

Delta and Tom calling in ducks on a slow day

What quality is that poop? The glamour of nest searching

The next phase of our work here is nest searching. Avian influenza can be detected in the fresh feces of ducks. We are looking for epithelial cells that are shed when the birds defecate, not the feces itself. Ducks often poop on their eggs when they flush. This can be a deterrent to predators from eating the eggs.

When we find a nest, we record, the number of eggs, the GPS coordinates, the flush type (hen absent, human, rope or dog)the egg age and if there is poop and what quality is the fecal sample and whether it was on the eggs or the vegetation. One person records while the other crew member calls out the information, so often one of us will say, "What quality is that poop?". Egg age is determined by candling the egg. The egg is placed against the end of a foam tube and rotated while being held towards the sun. We have a chart that we use but eventually memorize that correlates what we see to the age of the egg. We can predict to the day when hatch will occur.

We nest search by dragging a 60 foot rope with cans tied at intervals through nesting habitat to flush the hens. Brant also had brought his awesome yellow lab, Delta, to find nests. She is obviously the best nest searcher, it it amazing to see here work. Quartering back and forth the grass and willows Delta sniffs out nests and indicates in her body language that Brandt can read where the nest is.

Delta loves to nest search, she gets so excited when it's time to go out. When we are doing nest checks or something else that doesn't involve Delta, she'll still jump on the boat, hoping to go out in the field with us. On morning while gearing up to go out, I head a bird sing that I didn't recognize. I went over to behind the cabin to look for the bird and Delta followed me. Delta could see I was in search mode and started hunting across the trail and looking back at me, she was so excited. It was funny that she was trying to help me find the bird but actually causing more noise and distraction. She was so unbelievably cute.I never did find the bird in question, I believe it may have been a gray jay.

Mew Gull Release

This is an experimental try at putting on a video, if this works many more and more exciting videos will be added This was the only one already loaded on my computer.

Horned Grebe caught in duck trap

We sometimes catch horned and red-necked grebes in our decoy traps. Unlike ducks which just try to escape, the grebes will try to stab us with their bills. Ryan even had a horned grebe attack him after he released it! There is video of it, hopefully I can upload it.

Lesser Scaup Pseudopenis

Since the drakes are coming into the trap because they are attracted to the females, I guess they are still excited when we catch them and sometimes when we turn them over to swab them for avian influenza we find this!

Ducks and Geese and thier close relativet are the only birds that have an extendable sexual organ. Not all of thier copulation is what you would call consentual. We often see a group of male ducks forcing copulation on an unpaired hen. The sex ration in ducks is extremely skwed towards males. This pseudopenis and aggressive sexual behavior is one of the resonas there are so many duck hybrids seen in the wild.

Mew Gulls are attracted to the "floating" duck foot pellets we feed our decoy hens and sometimes get caught in the traps

Do you trust me?

On a boat like Leo!

Pintail and Wigeon

After we get the birds out of the trap we place them in kennels and store them on the boat until all the kennels are full or we empty all of the traps. The kennels have mesh netting inside to keep the birds from resting in their own feces. We split into crews of two and each has ten traps to check. We stop the boat away from a trap (to not distress the decoy hen any further) and process the birds. First we put on the band, then swab the bird's cloaca for avian influenza, then take measurements of the tarsus (leg), wing chord (folded wing), and head (tip of bill to back of head) and then weigh the bird. The study compares the body condition of birds with bird flu to those without. We need the morphometric measurements as a reference to the mass of the bird, as different sized birds can be expected to have different mass. After the bird is weighed it is released.

Ryan and I removing birds from decoy trap

Lesser Scuap in Decoy Trap

Decoy Trapping

Comparison of Lesser and Greater Scaup in photo.

I arrived in Fairbanks and was met by my boss Brandt. If you don't know birds, Brandt is the name of a cormorant and Brant is a type of goose, so having a boss who is a duck PhD student named Brant is hilarious. Actually I worked at a goose camp in the Canadian Arctic with a fellow named Drake! What's crazy is his sister is named teal and his brother Woody!...Anyway Brandt looks like Corey Feldman, but blond and also he looks like he's 19. He got carded when we went to a bar later.

I spent the next few days gathering up gear and food for camp. We loaded up Brandt's huge pick up with decoy hens from UAF's animal quarters and 10 rolls of welded wire to make traps. We drove up to Murphy Dome to meet the helicopter. Here I became acquainted with Troy, a true Greek God of chopper pilots. He has a tiny machine and it took three sling loads of welded wire and the hens went in the machine in kennels.

I flew out the next day with the satellite Internet guy in his Cessna 206 on amphibs, which are pontoons with wheels. We took off from tarmac at the Fairbanks airport but landed on the waters Big Minto Lake.

When I arrived at camp we put away the food and gear and aided Will as he set up the Internet system. Then we build traps for a week. We built 20 of these welded wire decoy traps. These traps consist of a center pen where a captive hen sits with food, she has a platform where she can get out of the water. The hen is surrounded by four pens with trap doors, that have a treadle that trips a fishing line set to the trigger of an old leg hold trap. When a duck comes into the trap to investigate the hen it depresses the treadle, trips the trigger and the door swings shut.

Mostly we catch males of whatever the species the hen is but sometimes we get territorial hens or even other species of ducks and even grebes and gulls.

We have hens of four species, pintail, lesser scaup, greater scaup and wigeon. We also have a pintail-mallard hybrid we named Blondie, who could barely attract anything.

For the next three weeks we checked the traps twice a day after breakfast and then after dinner. We wear stocking foot waders, which are breathable neoprene chest waders, but with booties that you wear under a wading boot. We do so much walking that rubber boot-foot waders would be too hot.

Canvasback

Why I'm in Alaska

I am in Alaska as a paid technician on a PhD student's avian influenza study he goes to University of Minnesota but this project is in conjunction with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which is who pays me. This is the first study in North America of the effect of avian influenza on waterfowl fitness and population dynamics. Most of the people who study A.I. are virologists, very little of the bird science has been done.

I am getting paid. However I am here for another currency, the access to remote habitat that is prohibitively expensive to visit. I am in the boreal forest, at the edge of the tree line. I am in a location only accessible by boat, helicopter and float plane. This is what I live for.

From the World Series of Birding to Alaska

I can't really begin my Alaska tale with out telling you what I did immediately before I left. I work as an environmental educator at Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center in Philadelphia. On May 8th I hosted a group of high school students and led them in a macroinvertebrate identification center. When that was done I headed to school to take my ecology final. I headed home and got ready for the World Series of Birding (WSB). The WSB is a 24 competition where teams compete trying to identify as many species of bird within the state of New Jersey in a 24 hour period. Teams raise money like the Race for the Cure or other charity events, in this case you raise an amount per bird. We raised funds for the American Bird Conservancy. The event started at midnight May 9th.

My team competed in the Carbon Footprint Cup, where you cannot use a motorized vehicle. We used bicycles and had a 90 or so mile route. Our team is called Ridin Birdy and we are sponsored by Kowa Sporting Optics My companions were Matthew Halley, Dan Kubza and Bull Gervasi. Bull is my room mate and former bandmate, he played bass. Matt is my neighbor and is a musician (www.mattheyhalley.org and nicebird.org) and field ornithologist. Dan is in nursing school and has done work for NJ Audubon. Bull served as our mechanic.

We started at Jake's Landing, which is a boat launch in a salt marsh. My roommate Vince drove us to the start. Dan was already down there scouting. Jake's Landing Road goes through pine woods before it goes out into the marsh. We picked up sora, Virginia Rail, whip-poor-will and some other marsh birds that happened to call at night. From there we went to Belleplain State Forest to get barred owl, chuck-wills-widow, and screech owl. Dan got us a campsite and we got two hours of sleep.

We woke up to Arcadian flycatcher and yellow-throated warbler. We hit all the spots in the forest and got most of the birds but missed Louisiana waterthrush but getting bowhite and prothonatary warbler.

In Belleplain we met up with Birding Adventures TV (birdingadventurestv.com) who filmed us throughout the day. The host is a charismatic South African professional bird guide. He passe us in a SUV and said "looks like I caught you riding birdy!".
We also met our competition, Team Dodo, which featured members of NJ Audubon who hosted the event!

From there we headed north despite having to end up at the bottom of New Jersey in Cape May. We wanted to go to Heislerville Wildlife Management Area to pick up salt marsh birds, ducks, gulls and shore birds on the mud flats. To our surprise we ran into Team Dodo at Heislerville, I didn't think another bicycle team would go back north like we did. We figured our advantage was the miles we would put in.

We headed down Route 47 which runs along the Delaware Bay shore and hit a few spots to pick up bald eagle, glossy ibis, surf scoter,royal tern red-headed woodpecker and a few other goodies. We missed gull-billed tern, and blue grosbeak. However we had a coup and Matt found us a black-billed cuckoo! Black-billed cuckoo is considered one of the hardest to see birds in our parts, a true skulker!

We crossed to canal to Cape May proper and hit up Higbee Beach and got our blue-groabeak! We headed to the Cape May Meadows and picked up oystercatcher and piping plover. We headed to the jetties at the point and got common tern our final new bird. We went over to a mudflat area called the "magnesite plant" The bugs were bad and it started to rain so we headed to my favorite cafe in Cape May for a meal. We tried for least bittern afterwards at Cape Island Preserve, but the frogs were so loud we gave up. We headed to the finish line and tapped out. At the finish we were informed by Team Dodo we had vanquished them.

The next day was the award ceremony. It was great to catch up with some friends and folks I rarely see. This was Sunday the next day I was on a plane to Alaska!

Arrival at Minto Flats Alaska

Welcome to Radical Naturalist. I'm Tony Croasdale an avid birder and horticulture student at Temple University, currently working with ducks in Alaska. I was asked to start this blog for my university's news. I will continue to post after my work in Alaska is done. I'm headed to Brazil for three months after Alaska, so there should be much fodder there. I will also do "retro-blogs" about my extensive overseas traveling with my punk band and for nature observing and field research. I only have a satellite connection here in Alaska so I'll be keeping these posts short for now, hopefully they will get longer and feature more photos when the work slows down and I have more free time at night.