A little about the Birds on Johnston

Johnston is a nesting ground for 14 pelagic seabird species and 5 wintering shorebird species. Obviously humans were directly responsible for the original decrease in seabird populations, simply because they were killed as a result of most JA operations. Less obvious at the time was the impact of pollution, which was brought to attention much earlier than the problem of invasive, specifically ants and the YCA. 

Red Tailed Tropic Birds - 

RTTB nest on the ground under trees, shrubs, up turned rootballs, or rock outcrops. They are ridiculously clumsy and are often seen crash landing some distance from their nests and then using their tiny webbed feet (reminds me of penguin feet) to flop around on their keel, the large ridge of bone that has developed where our sternum is. They also tend to "scorpion" or have their rear end roll up over their head, flinging their tail feathers forward and smoothing their beaks into the ground when they land with force. This usually happens when I'm surveying chicks and the parents are trying to get to them as quickly as possible.

 If you have the time to stand around watching one trying to return to it's nest you'll see it swoop in and hover over the shrub where it's nest is, pause as if to gauge the approach, rethink it and fly off to retry the landing. I've seen the same birds do this over and over again throughout the time it takes to raise their chick. They simply are not very coordinated. Twice I've been riding my bike along one of the 3 "roads" we use to get around the island and have had a Tropic Bird crash into me. 

The first collision happened when Jake I were coming back from a survey.  They like to nest and sometimes just rest under a shrub along the road and I think I must have spooked it into taking off. They are notorious for waiting until the last second to react to a disturbance and I, of course, did not have time to avoid it. It hit the front part of my bike and bounced off, luckily avoiding getting any part of itself stuck in my tire spokes. Amazingly I didn't lose control and crash, they're pretty small so the impact was minor, and when I had been able to stop my bike and stop yelling I went back to make sure it wasn't hurt. It sat in the middle of the road with it's wings outstretched glaring at me because I was laughing so hard and then, just as suddenly as when it hit me, took off into the air like nothing happened. The second time was more funny than the first but unfortunately I was by myself so no one else witnessed the ridiculousness. I was a minute from camp, cookin' along pretty fast because I was impatient to get back when I saw a bird coming in for a landing. I figured I was still pretty far away so I wouldn't interfere but the bird thought otherwise. When it finished it's "hover & contemplate" phase, instead of landing or flying away, it turned a flew straight into my head. My hands were still on the handlebars so luckily I didn't crash but I couldn't put them up to protect my face or push the bird away. I can only imagine what it looked like, me zooming along, screaming, and a Tropic Bird, also screaming, with its wings wrapped around my head. It took me a minute to slam on the breaks because I was going so fast and I was in shock, but once I did I shoved the bird off into a bush and took a second to calm down.

 Just this week I had a fledgling Tropic Bird decide to sleep at my tent for a few nights. The first night I almost stepped on it, again because the don't react until the last second and it was very dark when I walked back to my tent to go to bed. I say they sound like whiny babies with kazoos and they pretty much have one volume level which is LOUD. It was sitting right at the door to my tent like I was the intruder but I carefully threw a towel over it and moved it away from my camp behind a tree. Around the same time the next night I was walking along the path I had made from the ocean to my tent and almost stepped on the bird again!!! I yelled at it to leave me alone and just walked around it. Unfortunately I found it dead the next afternoon and I felt a little guilty even though it was not my fault. I have become used to birds dying, not that I am not sad each time I find one, because all the bird surveys we conduct are measuring reproduction success so of course a large part of our documentation is on "failed" reproduction, meaning the parents failed to produce offspring that made it to adulthood. We try not to get attached. We purposely do not give any of our birds names because we're pretty sure that jinxes them and makes them destined to die. 

Each CAST member surveys Tropic Bird nests weekly in two, assigned, 50 square meter "Reproduction Plots". We each inherited our plots from the previous CAST member that trained us. There are 10 plots altogether with half lying within the YCA infestation zone and half without. We monitor for nesting adults and Mark a new nest as soon as an egg is found. Then we come back and check the development weekly, watching for the first sign of a hatched chick. It takes 5-7 weeks for an egg to hatch but as soon as that happens the chick develops pretty rapidly and can be expected to reach a new growth stage roughly every week! They stages we record are 1-10 with our personal favorites being stages 1 and 2, when they're still fluffy, wobbly newborns and stage 5 when they've grown some feathers but kept enough fluff to look like a ridiculous bird-Einstein mash-up. They are so ugly it's hilarious. Unfortunately at this stage they've definitely developed their vocal abilities and use them without fail. Because we watch them from an egg we do end up getting attached but by the time they reach stage 10 and their parents are getting ready to abandon them they've become so annoying and have long since been remotely cute that we do not mind at all when they finally leave. There are a number of weeks that they stay in the nest as a fully grown stage 10 because it takes them a while before they become hungry enough that they quit waiting around for their parents to come back with dinner. I've witnessed a parent feeding a chick a couple of times and it is not pretty, it looks as though the parents face completely disappears in the mouth of the chick which still manages to be screaming at top volume.

 The other survey we do for Red Tails, as well as 2 other species of sea birds, is the Mean Incubation Count. Johnston is divided into 22 sectors and each CAST is tasked with surveying the sectors that are within the YCA infestation area for Red Tail nests every 43 days (the mean incubation time for Red Tails).