Metinic

Unlike the camper experience, work was actually a fun and exciting place to be. The second day of work I went out to Metinic Island to help with the bird census there. I got to meet most all the other people associated with the refuge complex and do things I most certainly had not experienced before. Not all of it was enjoyable, nor did I agree with all of it, but it was all part of the job so I took it with a grain of salt. 

In short, we walked around as much of the island as we could physically, and not so physically cover. That involved pushing ourselves through raspberry thickets that put up a good fight.  We tracked each seabird nest we would come by in the process. Essentially it should have been a tern census but the torrential rain I had spoken of earlier among other threats such as garter snakes, sheep, gulls, merlins, and eagles pushed the terns to re-nest elsewhere. Instead we marked both herring and black-backed gull nests and eider nests. Guillemots and storm petrels, as well as some shorebirds also reside and reproduce there, but those were not of concern on this day. The researchers that stay on the island are able to cover what information is needed of those birds on their own.

Since it had still only been the second day, I could not get over how instead of being stuck behind either a cubicle, a sales counter, or a food line, I was spending my time breaking through waves on a boat toward an island, ransacking bogs and the thickest and thorniest of raspberry thickets I have ever come across, and witnessing a world of wilderness that I had never experienced before. Just from the second day of work I could tell you what herring gull, black-backed gull, eider, and tern eggs look like along with the nests they would be found in. I even got to see my first eider chicks! They're so precious!

Before that, I didn't even know what an eider or tern was! I feel so thankful that the staff at this refuge feel the same way as I do in getting me out to see and experience a little bit of everything that goes on. =]