Journal of a Sabbatical

May 17, 2001

yes radio

Plover count: 12 pairs

Today's Bird Sightings:
Plum Island:
great black back gull (3)
ring billed gull (5)
double crested cormorant (11)
oldsquaw (6)
common grackle (1)
herring gull (1)

Today's Reading: Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux

Today's Starting Pitcher: David Cone (I think-- I didn't actually listen to the game today)

The radio works, there are plenty of report forms, and the beach looks nothing at all like it did on Monday. Not a whole lot of bird activity or a lot of visitor activity is going on today either.

The guy who was on before me said the male of the pair nesting closest to the north boundary where I am today had gotten killed by a predator, likely a crow, and the female was still hanging around. She won't be able to incubate the eggs by herself, so I guess those will be abandoned and she'll have to find a new male and re-nest. Later in the shift, Jean stopped by and mentioned the same story of the untimely death of the male from the northernmost nest.

This brought up a question I've been wondering about. Do the predator exclosures really work or do they signal to the predators where to find the nests? Jean mentioned that they'd stopped exclosing the nests for fear that the predators are keying in on them. I know the exclosures and symbolic fencing at Sandy Point act like a magnet for visitors who want to see the plovers on the nest. On a crowded, busy beach day that can put a lot of stress on the plovers. I've seen people go up to the symbolic fences to peer at the nests on Sandy Point in past years though I haven't seen it yet this year. But people are different from predators.

Crows and great black backs in particular are very smart and I can easily believe they learn that where those exclosures are they'll find tasty little piping plovers. In fact I've seen great black backs hang around between the predator exclosure and the water line as if they're waiting for something, but figured I was just anthropomorphizing. I don't know enough about the habits of great black backs to tell for sure, and it's really only two pairs that I've observed doing this so it's not a scientific sample. I haven't seen any literature about this, but then again I haven't been looking. This is the sort of thing I muse about between visitors on the beach, but then forget to research when I get home.

Besides musing about predators and watching the waves, I did talk to a few visitors: 4 to be exact. One woman told me she'd seen a huge raft of oldsquaws early this morning and wanted to know if they were still around. I told her there were only 6 hanging around and they'd been there since 11:30 (this was mid-afternoon). Oldsquaws (or as they're now called, long-tailed ducks) are usually in large rafts (of hundreds) or medium-sized flocks (of dozens) so it is kind of strange to be watching one pair keeping their distance from another group of 4. The pair never joined up with the other four. The same visitor also told me she'd heard that the curlew sandpiper had left, so I won't get a chance to see it after all. Half of today's visitors knew about the beach closure and simply came over to ask questions. The other half did not know about the beach closure and had to be intercepted as they power walked along the tide line. That's a pretty typical breakdown of visitor encounters.

Must find some time to research the literature on predator exclosures...

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