It was a cold April morning when Clare Flynn (penguin biologist from Heather Lynch’s lab), Esther Nosazeogie, Kim Lato (the latest Thorne lab PhD graduate), and Lesley Thorne (P.I.), set out to East Moriches to get the show on the road. The show, being our gull field season for 2024, began with high adventure. Thanks to tricky sandy shoals on the way into our island field site, cold winds (we underestimated how cold!) and some boat trouble, it took solid boating skills to navigate to and from our field site. Eventually, however, we prevailed and Clare, Esther, and Lesley got trained up to deploy tags on great black-backed gulls for the rest of the field season.
Our gull tagging work is part of a project examining the potential impacts of offshore wind development on marine wildlife. The data that these tags will transmit through the GSM network will enable us to describe seabird movement and behavior before and after offshore wind development and answer other questions about great black-backed gull habitat use, as part of Esther’s dissertation.
We had several other less adventurous field outings to our tagging sites on Long Island. And afterward, Esther and Clare went to Tuckernuck Island, Massachusetts, drove around in a golf cart, and conned 23 gulls into wearing GPS tags (“black-backs with back-packs”). Esther could not help but imagine that the Tuckernuck gulls were having similar conversations to that between Mumble (the little penguin in Happy Feet) and the skuas. This field season, we had several people from the lab pitch in to help, and of course, it was merrier! Also, people got their boat driving, bird handling, and bird espionage experience.
It was fitting that we wrapped up the gull field season for Spring 2024 on a fine May day with no boat troubles, having deployed a whopping 41 tags in all! Esther cannot wait to get inundated with gull movement data and keep working on her PhD chapters!