We are very fortunate to have our friend from England, Pam Birley continuing to provide a detailed watch from her home in Leicester on the happenings at Race Rocks via the two remote controlled cameras, 1 and 5 and the underwater camera 2. There are many stories revealed by her photo gallery on Flickr. A sample of her work is presented below: Her complete 2013 gallery is at https://www.flickr.com/photos/66339356@N00/albums
We can follow the patterns of marine mammal use of the islands for haulout and births, and individual accounts such as her “6-spot”, a harbour seal which she has observed on the same rock by the jetty since every year since 2007. She tracks our breeding elephant seals and she is one of the few to catch the river otter scenes on the island as well.
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- Branded sealions.
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- winter haulout patterns.
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- Chunk returns in May 2013.
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- Male elephant seal Misery cooling off.
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- Misery and Chunk in a battle.
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- Elephant seal groups.
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- Resident river otter.
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- 6-spot december20, 2013.
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- 6-spot october 13 2013.
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- 6-spot september 21, 2013.
Pam also has made some interesting captures on the Underwater Camera 2 . There are several species of fish and invertebrates shown and a few unidentified ones show up as well .
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- A yellow rockfish.
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- Black rockfish.
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- Unidentified fish.
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- Male kelp greenling.
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- sea urchin grazing off the diatoms.
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- Divers come to clean the housing.
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- Cleaning off diatoms.
Her accounts of the birds of Race Rocks are also invaluable. The roosting patterns of many species, the nesting behaviour of black oystercatchers and glaucous-winged gulls, migratory shorebird stopovers as well as predation and scavenging are detailed in her gallery.
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- Bonapart gull, a new visitor
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- Cormorant winter haulout
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- BLOY agregation
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- Pigeonguillemot feather detail.
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- Pams details of feathers are exceptional
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- White-front takeoff
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- territorial disputes
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- Timing of Gull nesting season.
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- Mother and chicks
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- Gull chick
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- Nictitating membrane of raven
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- Ravens as scavengers.
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- adult eagle perched on Cam5
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- Juvenile eagle
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- Claws of juvenile
So thanks again to Pam Birley for her commitment to having continued her watch in 2013. Her contribution to “Citizen Science ” is appreciated. The 2013 gallery is here
Posts tagged with Pam Birley can be seen here:
posts tagged with Webcam Visitor Observations can be seen here:
Links to the complete set of Pam’s Race Rocks images is available here: