11 Apr ‘Wild Florida’ Adventures – Banding Skimmers
It was still dark when we gathered in the small office. Dressed in long-pants and long-sleeves with steaming coffee mugs in hand and headlamps shining from our foreheads, we headed to the boat ramp. In an early morning daze, we talked in unnecessarily hushed tones as we divided onto two pontoon boats.
We were a mix of biologists, staff, interns and volunteers from the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and Florida Audubon. We were all there to help catch and tag black skimmers as part of a long-term monitoring project. It was a new moon and city lights were obscured from this protected maze of mangroves but our captain knew the way, using a spotlight only occasionally to light a reflector here and there. We glided across calm waters and in no time pulled onto the backside of a skimmer nesting beach on an island in the Rookery Bay Reserve.
There were nets, boxes and bags of gear to haul down the beach to the nesting area. It was further than I expected, but not terribly far. We gathered in a circle, received some instruction and then were set loose. My partner had done this before. She disappeared into the darkness. As I tried to follow, I heard her call – she’d caught one. I rushed over to find a young black skimmer cowered on the sand below her net. We carefully freed it from its binds. I tucked it into the crook of my elbow, gently but firmly pinning it between my body and arm. I’d barely completed the task when I heard from my partner that she’d caught another, further down the dune. In no time I had four birds nestled in my arms. I headed back toward our makeshift camp to drop off our captures. I could only see headlights bobbing in the distance, but sounds of shuffling feet and hollered successes filled the air with excitement. The holding box quickly filled with birds, and the mood became more serious as everyone returned from the dunes to process the haul.
Team members took their positions seated in a circle on the sand, the order determined by their assigned research tasks. The first bird was extracted from the box and handed to the team lead who carefully looked the bird over. It was a young, healthy and unbanded new bird. The team sprang into action. Someone handed the lead biologist a tape measure. Someone else recorded the numbers he rattled off as he measured beak, body, wings and more. One woman fished out a metal leg-band and read the number out to the recorder. The tag was handed to the biologist and the recorder read the number back to him. It matched. The biologist used specialized pliers to secure the band around the bird’s leg, then handed the bird to someone else. This person carefully placed the first bird on a scale to weigh it while the head biologist began examining the next bird.
Like an assembly line, the researchers efficiently processed and released birds until they hit a glitch – a bird with one eye gooed shut. This was a new symptom, likely a sign of a yet undetermined disease that had recently shown up on a handful of birds. They needed to send a sample to an epidemiology lab, which required new equipment to be pulled out – cotton swabs and test tubes among other things. Everything needed sanitizing after this bird was processed. It wasn’t long though before the rhythm returned, and soon all the birds were processed. The sky was still dark. There was time for one more round of catching.
Again, the bobbing lights spread across the dune. Again, hollers of success rang through the air. Again, my arms filled with young birds. Processing this time was much faster. Partly because the equipment was out and roles were established, but probably more importantly, most of these birds were recaptures – the very same birds we’d caught, tagged and measured in our first round. One by one, the birds were returned to their spots on the dunes. The sky was losing its inky edge. It was time for us to leave the beach, clearing off before the colony as a whole was aware of our presence. This was behind-the-scenes work; work designed for most of the birds not to notice, yet work that might make all the difference to the future of the birds nesting on this South Florida beach.
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