Report from the Field
From an e-mail dated June 29, 2008
Last week, collaborators and I completed Phase 1 of a scientific study addressing interactions between local seabirds from coastal Washington and Oregon and fish populations in the same area. As part of this work, we placed satellite tags on 7 sooty shearwaters. Shearwaters breed in New Zealand but spend "winters" feeding off the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts. The tags enable us to track where individual birds are located several times each day for approximately 60 days.
These 7 individuals were tagged just offshore of Cape Disappointment State Park, on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington. Anyone with access to the internet can now follow, day-to-day, the positions of each of these birds (until the batteries on the tags run out). Additional birds will be tagged very soon in Monterey Bay, CA, and those tags will also be posted. We hope to deploy 3 additional tags in August 2008 off the Columbia River, as well as deploy additional tags again in 2009.
Jen's profile
You can follow the tagged birds' tracks in near-real time.
First, click on the link that follows, then click on "accept terms" to view the maps.
http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/?project_id=282
Read a related article
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/334055_fish03.html
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Click image to learn more about shearwaters
Cape Disappointment, where NWFSC Biologist, Jen Zamon and her collaborators tag shearwaters.
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