Pup-date and new photos

I have just transferred over 800 photos and over 100 videos from my camera, which have been added to the ever growing collection. A lot has happened on the island since my last post, from a 2nd west end trip with an intertidal crew partly from NOAA (with me performing crash-test dummy duty to show them how to use the zipline and harnesses), to male moves (Pete and Andre continually switch between sand flat and mirounga beach, with satellite males being chased off whilst approaching cows on the fringes of harems). Also a quick pup-date, we are up to 83 cows in attendance, although the pup birth rate has slowed (i'm sure there will be another spurt soon!), and sadly we have had 6 dead pups so far. Below are a selection of the thousands of photos I've taken so far. On Saturday I start my 2 week break from the island after 2 months of work. I'll be around San Fran for a few days, and hope to make it to Monterey befre heading to Alaska to visit my sister and her boyfriend.

 

A pup propping itself up on two cows to have a look

An American Robin crossing the path

 

Maintop (on west end) behind the elephant seal blind / hide, with a male lying underneath.

 

California sea lions on a misty west end

 

A common murre in colony

 

Pete displays to a female

 

A sooty-fox sparrow perches in one of 4 trees on the island

 

A pup, soon to be weaned as he is 26 days old.

Pete splashes around in the water

 

A wet Pete

 

One of the first blows of a fight in the water (video below)

 

A burrowing owl perched in front of one of his burrows

 

A california sea lion gets slightly wet as the tide moves in

Also here are two videos. The first is of the first proper fight we have witnessed between big males. This happened moments after I took the photos of Pete in the water shown above. Another male swam up behind him and they started fighting abruptly. After the video ends the unknown male swims off, heading towards west end, and Pete seemed relatively unharmed.

https://vimeo.com/117769051

The second is not quite the same quality, or as close to the action, but it is of several humpbacks seen from the steps of the house as I put my shoes on! 

https://vimeo.com/117770495

Varying visibility

San Francisco and the bay area are rather famous for the amount of fog that gathers. The farallones is not immune to this occurrence, although we have been fairly lucky until now. We've started to notice fog being present in the mornings, but last night it became apparent later. I brought an SLR time-lapse remote with me which I used many times in Ireland, often to record sunsets. I hadn't used it here yet, and as the sky was rather clear yesterday, with just a few wispy clouds I decided to finally set my camera up on top of the weather box (which houses an air thermometer) in front of the house. As you can see in the video below, it started off well until fog rolled in.

This morning I left the house to sit on the front steps whilst doing "seawatch" (a 5 minute survey, documenting seabirds flying across the ocean to/from their roosts and colonies). I set down the tripod, turned round to look at the sea, and realized that I couldn't as the fog was so thick the visibility was ~300m. This is quite a contrast to the last few weeks where it has averaged 30-60 miles!

Fog moving in over lighthouse hill

Apart from coping with limited viz, we have been rather busy. Fish and wildlife services were here this week with 7 contractors, which meant doing 3 boat landings in 4 days, and 2 helicopter landings with the coastguard. We have had our first major re-shuffle of large male elephant seals, with displacements and injuries.

On top of this, we have been keeping on top of our other pinniped studies, keeping track of all cow arrivals, movements and pupping (we now have 20 pups), and searching for bird species. We have had two new bird arrivals of note. Firstly the purple finch, a beautiful red bird, and a northern harrier (who has since departed).

Northern harrier

As the grey whale migration has reached its peak, we have carried out 3 all day surveys. These span 7am - 5pm, with observers taking 2 hour blocks. On our last survey we saw 56 grey whales, 4 humpbacks, and 10 unidentified dolphins. The weather has cooperated brilliantly, and has allowed me to start doing timelapses more regularly without worrying about it raining whilst I travel the island. Firstly, I took the 7-9am and 3-5pm slots at the lighthouse, which allowed me to enjoy the elevated perspective at different times, and catch a timelapse of both sunrise and sunset. The below video shows a quick timelapse of a sunrise from east landing, and then both sunrise and sunset from the lighthouse.
https://vimeo.com/116721816

Secondly, a timelapse of the elephant seal colony on sand flat. It shows the movement of cows and pups, and also if you look down the beach in the left corner of the video, you can see a cow stuck throughout the video. This is the second time it has happened when pregnant cows attempt to haul out on a steep incline where there is a slight dip below. This cow was stuck for several hours, and ended up struggling through a pool of her own blood from a cut on her flippers gained from scrambling repeatedly on rocks. She managed to get back down (at the end of the video), and then tried again and managed to get up (Check This Farallon blog post for more information on the first occurrence).
https://vimeo.com/116722692

Four weeks and three people down

Today marks our fourth week on the island (and cookies were made to celebrate). Throughout this time we have said goodbye to RJ, and today Meumeu left on his break, and Sean left, having finished sorting through californian sea lion faecal matter for a diet study. Conditions were perfect for the landing thankfully, as the logistics of launching and taking a boat out of the water with a crane with only 3 people in rough weather would not be easy.

As mentioned in the last post, we made a trip to west end, a rugged and untouched area of the island. When Ryan very casually first mentioned having to zip-line across to another part of the island for a pinniped census, we all thought he was joking, until we saw the harnesses in the drinks cupboard. Conditions were perfect for the trip, sun shining with small swells. Just as well, as the zipline goes mere metres above the water in a channel between the sections of the island.

Getting onto west end was the easy part, as it was slightly down-hill, and at low-tide. Trekking across this section of the island made "our" side seem tiny, and incredibly easy to navigate. We climbed 90% incline slopes and cliffs of granite where hand-holds came off in your hand, continually crouching to avoid scaring pinnipeds into the water. There are several thousand californian sea lions present on this side of the island as it is undisturbed by humans, and another elephant seal colony which is home to another group of females, a huge male, and unfortunately a dead pup.

Luckily the visibility was incredible, and we saw over 30 whales throughout the day.

The blow of a grey whale, showing a perfectly distinguishable heart shape which is very unusual to see around the windy farallones!

Despite the numbers of other pinnipeds, there were only ~30 fur seals present on the island during our visit, which is a low number compared to previous years at the same time.

We will go back a few more times during my stay to check on numbers of pinnipeds, and this will also give me a bit more practice zip-lining, which I apparently need. Returning on the zip-line was a lot more difficult than coming, as it was up-hill enough to need a hard push off the rocks, whilst timing your jump so that you didn't get hit by a breaking wave. This took me four attempts, coming close enough to the opposite wall to touch it, but not quite enough to grasp the slippery surface and get a foot-hold. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, swinging back and forth whilst somehow avoiding incoming swells was rather fun! I'm definitely looking forward to our next trip over, however until then we have plenty of work to do, with only three of us collecting the same amount of data that 5 were collecting up until yesterday.

The work load is increasing too, with 2 pups, 15 cows, and 7 main males to keep an eye on, alongside younger individuals, new arrivals, other pinniped species, increasing numbers of cetaceans, and sea, shore and song birds. We have had a few interesting arrivals from song birds too, with an uncommon Cassin's finch alongside more commonly seen American Robins and lesser green finches.

A chunky American Robin

Townsends warbler in flight

A burrowing owl

Lesser gold finch with cassin's finch

However, not all of the birds are thriving. Probably due to a lack of food availability, we have been noticing a die-off of cassin's auklets, regularly finding dead birds. We clip their wings (to avoid double counting, not to stop them from flying...) and document them, and sometimes it is harder to ID them than others.

An old, crispy cassins auklet which has been sat on by an elephant seal

Due to the increasing numbers of cows, and subsequently viable mates, the larger male elephant seals are becoming protective of the colony, throwing out younger males and becoming quick to bite youngsters that get too close to the females.

A cute immature, a welcome sight after sneaking among the larger guys

We haven't witnessed any big fights thus far, although have seen plenty of puncture wounds on animals and small pools of blood. Until the truly impressive fighting starts, it is quite nice to watch the younger males play-fight.

Despite how busy some days are, we always make time to gather to watch the sunset when it is clear enough, and watch the pelicans and murres flying by.