Wildlife notes

Merriam Websters Word of the Day today is assiduous – “showing great care, attention, and effort.”  The Energy Building black oystercatchers has been assiduous in their nest building efforts, selecting and carrying each wave-washed rounded shell fragment to their nesting site to create a surface among the rocks and boulders for their precious eggs. The word implies they are in it for the long haul or can sit with or in this case, sit on their task. But then for unknown reasons they just pack it in. They laid 2 eggs on their first nest but discarded both those eggs, sort of rolled them off a cliff and started over. They built a second nest only a foot away where they laid one egg. They diligently kept that one egg warm for over two weeks. Today they decide to abandon that nest as well and have moved their one egg another foot away to a third location (last year they moved nests only once).  I noticed the move at 11:30am. They spent the day carrying the shells to around the moved egg and had somehow managed to lift the egg in the process. What was wrong with the two discarded eggs from nest 1? What was wrong with nest 2? How did they move the egg to nest 3 and not break it? Nest 3 is further away from the nearby gull nest and closer to the smaller rocks which may provide more cover for the chick but I guess we will never really know.  CLICK on the image below to enlarge it.

Facility work

• cleaned solar panels
• weeding along walkway
• scrubbed another 2 meter section of the oily Generator Room floor
• cut away two leaking sections of firehose and refastened. I had to repair the cistern hose section before the gull chicks hatch. Moving around in the open area could result in a chick or two being killed as they all run about in a panic with no where to hide.

Vessels

• Ecotourism: 15
• Private: 3

Weather

Clear skies during the day with westerlies 13 to 20.  Fog by early evening with westerlies 28 knots and increasing. Daytime temperature 10 to 11 degrees.