Alaska

Well I made it to Nome, Alaska about a week ago now and have had a brilliant first week here. The godwits have been tricky to find but strategic searching, along with networking with other birders and some good luck has enabled us to catch three pairs of godwits on the nest. To our knowledge, this is the first time pairs of godwits have been caught on the breeding grounds.

The weather is warmer than anticipated, so the mosquitos are out in force on still days, never before have I been happy for the wind.

The wildlife as we travel around is stunning - musk ox are seen daily, bears, squirrels, Artic hares, moose and caribou have all benn seen. It's great.

Fellowship Reflections (week 20)

The Pandemic has begun



Last night, just four days before I am due to travel 36 hours sardine-like in an aeroplane and associated congested airports, the World Health Organisation announce the world is officially experiencing a flu pandemic. Does this really make any difference? Honestly, I don't know, it will depend on how others react and what officials decide to do about it. No recommended changes to international travel are recommended at this stage, so I am feeling comfortable about it all. That said, I have taken advice and armed myself with Tamiflu and facial masks for my travel. My only concern really, is getting some small cold or sniffle and being quarantined as a "suspected case" because I exhibit "flu-like symptoms". Here's hoping all goes smoothly and come mid-next week I find myself comfortably enjoying the view from my cabin in Nome - better still, from my wanderings across the Alaskan tundra!



One of my highlights of this week was getting back into the classroom again, admittedly with students much younger than I am used to. I was able to visit a bunch of great kids at Aokautere School who are studying Antarctica. I was able to take down some of the museum resources from the Ecology Department, such as a King Penguin and Polar Bear skull & leg. I was able to link in their studies with some of my work on Godwit migration, comparing some the geology and fauna of the Arctic with Antarctica. It was great fun.




Next time I write will hopefully be next week from Alaska!

Fellowship Reflections (week 19)

A close shave

Over this week the four of us heading to Alaska depart with various separate schedules. The first to leave was Jesse on Saturday, reason being, he was to visit Fairbanks to look at museum specimens of godwits - take photos and do some spectrometry work. However, in the 5 months here at Massey we had no success in getting the spectrometer to work as we required. First attempts back in February centered around trying to get the light source (a Xenon PX-2) to fire up while connected to the spectrometer. We then found out from the sales rep. that we were missing the breakout box, a critical part that assisted communication between the two pieces. That then got ordered. Arriving April or so, we tried again. Still no luck - we then had to go through each part to work out where the problem lay. We finally identified the actual spectrometer had faults and so needed repairing. Now early May we faithfully shipped it off to the States with URGENT written all over it, hoping repairs could be completed prior to our departure, early June. Well, Wednesday last week the part arrived, 3 days before Jesse headed off and needed to take it with him. We carefully put all equipment together, having already tested each part knowing individually they worked, we then pressed the critical ON button and... silence. It still didn't go! Grrrrrrr!! Thursday morning, as a final desperate check, we were up at the Chem lab at Massey (they had a functioning unit we could troubleshoot with), we then piece by piece replaced their parts with ours, the hope was to create our own fully functioing unit. Eventually we found that one cable was the cause of the problem - the thing was, for the whole system to work the cable actually needed to be inserted upsidedown! So, now with just over one day to go before departure, we needed to perfect the actual use of the gear. Talk about cutting it fine!

Here's the setup I'm talking about...

Innocuous looking stuff, caused us enough grief though. Anyway, positive outcome in the end.

So, Saturday was a great day because I got to pick up my Sibley Field Guide to North American Birds. I've always travelled with a field guide for each country and have a great stash of them in my book shelf. This one though will be very special as the birds we see in Alaska are going to be just amazing. I will of course, gleefully scribble each sighting in my book as a wonderful record of my time up there. I love being a bird geek!

Fellowship Reflections (week 17)

Alaska Planning

Diagram - polartrec

A fair amount of time over recent weeks has been spent planning the forthcoming trip to Alaska. It has been hard to avoid some horrendous flights to get to where we are going (I have something like 36 hours worth of travel to get to Nome - Nome is home for 3 weeks), but it's going to be worth it. We are heading up to Nome because the Seward Peninsula is a good breeding ground for Bar-tailed Godwits, though they are notoriously hard to find on their nests.

A Nome Godwit - Ralph Poanessa

They have fanastic cryptic plumage and sit tight on their nests, apparently you can get 1-2m away before they fly off! So the trick will be finding them. A current expedition in Alaska, finding Bristle-thighed curlews, is taking about 40 person-hours per nest. Here's a great photo to give a sense of what the challenge will be...

Photo USGS

Nome is also the ending point of the the famous Iditarod, the trail dog sled race. Not quite the season for it when we are there, given we will have 22 or so hours of daylight, but I'm sure we'll find some of the history of the race around the streets of Nome. Bring it on!

Fellowship Reflections (week 15)

Sexing It Up

Red Knots are monomorphic, they show no significantly different features that would allow them to be sexed in the field. So, over the last week or so, my focus up here at Massey has been on methods to extract DNA from Red Knots and to use this DNA to determine their sex. Of importance is developing a method that allows me to extract and amplify DNA from feathers. We usually pluck only about 3-5 breast feathers and 2 scapulas from the birds. I therefore have trialled just using one feather as a DNA source and this has been hugely successful. I was able to extract DNA using a couple of methods, amplify it using PCR and primers that were specific to our lovely Knots, then run then DNA through a gel to get our results. Here's me looking all geeked up in the Farside Lab, part of the Alan Wilson Centre at Massey (I think the blue gloves will take off on the catwalk this winter).




An interesting thing about bird sex is that unlike humans, where the male is XY and the female XX, in birds the male is ZZ and the female ZW. Therefore, when doing electrophoresis the female gives two bands, at 400bp and 600bp, and the male a single band at 400bp. Here's a photo of my first gel, which shows a bit of messiness in the first column, beyond the ladder, but a clear male in the second column and some clear females out to the right. It works! Yay.

Fellowship Reflections (week 12)

Yikes, my feathers are wearing out!

The birds have flown, so the feild work takes a pause for a bit. Now it's time to get into some lab work. My attention is being divided across three main areas: Genetic sexing, feather reflectance measurements and microscope work to examine feather wear. I will get into genetic sexing of red knots soon, they are monomorphic and we need to be able to determine sex from feather samples using PCR. Feather reflectance is a major part of our study, yet we have had all sorts of problems getting our incredibly expensive equipment to work effectively, that's frustrating! So, the most recent work has been on looking at feather wear. Birds moult and replace worn feathers and we are interested in how melanin investment affects the wear and reflectance of the feathers. You can see in this photo below, a relatively new feather and a worn feather.

The wear in this case maps the black outline of the feather - black has different proportions of melanins than the red coloured feather. Our job is to come up with a method that allows us to consistently score the degree of wear. We have spent some time looking at the feathers under 90x magnification, examining barbs and barbules and the wear. Here's some shots- up close and personal.Above you can see how the barbules have worn off the barbs. Zooming in (though admittedly on a different feather), these look a bit like this...

and zooming in again...

Who would have guessed there was so much to a feather? Looks aren't everything, are they? Yet for birds they are a lot - camouflage, quality signals, status signals and more. Hmmm...better leave it there, so I don't wear you out.

Royal Society Reflections (week 9)

Where are they now?

Godwits in flight (photo by Craig)

So, last night, with a Southerly kicking in, Jesse Conklin (a researcher at Massey) reported the last likely departures from Foxton Estuary (bringing his 17 nights or so of migration watch to a close). The birds are all but gone, but prior to their departure Phil caught this photo of a Red Knot from Foxton that was well and truely ready to go - it's staggering to see the amount of fat stored on the breast, reserves for the huge flight ahead. How can it even get off the ground?

One fat Red Knot (photo by Phil Battley)

So, where are they now? Well, birds are heading north west from NZ towards their first stop-over, the staging grounds of the Yellow Sea. Here they will feed up for a few weeks before heading off again to the breeding grounds in Russia or Alaska. This photo below shows some of the tracked godwits and their movements around the Yellow Sea.

Yellow Sea - photo from USGS site

The shores of the Yellow Sea are critical refuelling sights for migrating birds, yet throughout East Asia and Australasia, 85 per cent of shorebird populations are declining, and 40 per cent of shorebirds inhabiting Oceania are classified as threatened or near threatened (read more here). One of the major reasons for decreasing populations may be due to the reduction of sites for birds due to land reclamation of intertidal flats. Loss of fields of mud seems to cause less concern globally than loss of some other habitats, yet these are vital for the survival of numerous species. Conservation efforts are underway. The Ramsar Convention makes efforts to recognise wetlands of international importance, acknowledging that migratory birds do not bother about the boundaries humans have drawn on our 2D world maps. As the convention says...Wetlands included in the list acquire a new status at the national level and are recognised by the international community for being significant not only for the country, or countries, in which they are located, but for humanity as a whole. New Zealand has 6 Ramsar's sites: Manawatu River Mouth & Estuary, Firth of Thames, Farewell Spit, Awarua Wetlands, Kopuatai Peat Dome and Whangamarino . Other groups raise awareness of the issues around land use and conservation of such important sites, for example see Birds Korea. I encourage anyone to find out more and support local initiatives for conservation of areas used by our shorebirds, such as The National Wetland Trust, Miranda Naturalists' Trust and D.O.C's Wetland work.