I will be the PolarTREC teacher on St. Paul Island for the Seabird Ecology in the Bering Sea project beginning on July 15, 2009. The research project is designed to help us to better understand the ways in which climate change may be impacting the seabirds of the Pribilof Islands. Of particular concern is a change in the population of fish species, upon which these birds depend for their survival.Part of my assignment on St. Paul will be to learn to identify the different fish species that the birds are feeding to their offspring and to themselves during the breeding season. Now, I have lots of experience with fish identification in the Chesapeake Bay area, I even teach this to my students during one of our seventh grade field projects. The difference here is that I'll need to be able to identify the fish while they are in flight. Wait a minute, fish in flight??
Actually, the fish that I'm referring to are being carried by the seabirds that are flying back to the nest with their catch. I will need to learn to identify these unlucky fish by a part of a tail or fin sticking out from the beak of a Thicked-billed Murre or Black-legged Kittiwake. This will not be easy!
To help out, my team leader, Rachael Orben, was kind enough to send me a resource guide entitled, "The Flying Fish Workshop." This was from a conference that she'd attended earlier this year and has been quite helpful to me in "boning up" on my fish identification skills. With a little luck and some hard work, I'll soon be able to id fish with names like, greenling, poacher, searcher, ronquil, gunnel and prickleback. And I thought that I was going to the Pribilofs to study birds! The more we look, the more that we can see the connections between living things.
This murre has a meal from the Bering Sea! Photo by Nathan K. Banfield
Careful study of this guide and I'm sure, lots of questions to Rachael and the other team members will help me in my quest to become a competent flying fish identifier. At least I hope so! I'll continue to study my guide books and I'll keep the readers posted on my skill development as I go along!
Squid is also a part of the seabird diet in the Pribilofs! Photograph by Nathan K. Banfield