Field season 2022 done :-)

Takk for oss! The Sklinna field season 2022 is history.

The challenges this year:

• Avian influenza. At least 8 great black-backed gulls died from the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain. Luckily, the virus did not spread to other species. For us, it meant a lot of precautions, changing bird bags, field clothes and washing equipment to keep not only us safe but also preventing us from transferring the disease.

• The weather. Dry, hot and sunny in June was a challenge for at least the black-kittiwakes in Sør-Gjæslingan. Several of the chicks did not cope with the heat and died in their nests or dropped down into the water where they drowned. The wet, rainy and stormy weather in May and then also in July, the most busy part of our field season, was a challenge to get GPS and GLS deployments on shags and guillemots done.

• Bity birds! It’s normal that seabirds bite and seabird researchers have scarred hands, but this year it seemed that our normally quite gentle common guillemots joined forces with the shags. Maybe they heard me saying that they behave almost like penguins, and now wanted to prove this point even more??? However, office scissors are the worst (the cut on my left index finger is still healing…)

The joys:

• Good data. This is why we do the work in the first place – the data. Besides monitoring population numbers, breeding success, adult survival and collecting diet samples / taking photos of fish-carrying birds, we obtained GPS tracks from 50+ shags and 12 common guillemots, deployed about 100 GLS loggers on common guillemots, shags and puffins – and got a good number of GLS loggers back as well, including some almost overdue ones from 2018 and 2019. While GPS loggers tell us where the birds are foraging during the breeding season, the much smaller GLS loggers, attached to a leg-ring, help us to identify winter locations of the birds.

European Shag (left) with a GPS logger on its tail and a temperature-depth recorder attached to a leg-ring. Common guillemot (right) with a GLS logger attached to the leg ring.

• The privilege to work with seabirds! Bity or not, they are one of a special kind. Our regular puffin-round to check for breeding success and chick growth rates was this year renamed to “lundekos” (“puffin-enjoyment”)

Puffin chick (top left), Black-legged kittiwake with chick (middle left), European shag chick (bottom left), Common guillemots (right).

• Good teamwork! It’s a joy to get things done efficiently, rely on and trust your teammates – and pull through challenges if need be. Be it the work in the muddy, smelly and noisy guillemot colony, fishing out shag chicks from smelly “hellhole-nests” under bolders with narrow entrances (“shag yoga skill required”), or hurrying up to deploy the last GPS-loggers just in time before the unexpected thunderstorm hit.

• Good food. Self-caught fish and other seafood almost every day is a good Sklinna-tradition – and a handful of early cloudberries a real treat to round off the season

The failures:

• Boat trouble. A leaking boat and a dead bilge pump at the same time as bad weather hitting is a really bad combination. We got professional help at the right time – and were glad to have a good insurance company to cover the costs.   

• A twisted ankle. Luckily only the ankle, it could have been worse! Although painful and annoying, I could still walk with it and do my job

• A washed field notebook – oops! There is a reason why we write with pencil… Since it was in the trouser pocket, the pages stayed intact, and all my notes could still be read after drying the book – rather amazing! Still, I was glad I had entered all important data into the computer the day before the washing accident.

Now it’s time for holidays – and come May 2023, I will be very happy to return to this very special seabird island 😊