Kevin Fraser takes over as the ACWERN-UNB student rep from Alex Bond. Thanks Alex for a job well done! For email contact or other information about students contact Kevin Fraser .

1. News from the Lab
2. Director
3. Current Students
4. Past Students
5. Recent Publications


1) News from the Lab:

Spring has finally sprung here in Fredericton. After a lengthy cold spell, we’re now above freezing and pretty wet. It’s also been pretty busy here in the Lab. While we don’t have any new students since the last update, Amie Black (M.Sc. Biology) and Laura Minich (M.Sc. Biology) both defended their theses in recent months – congratulations!

Marie-Paule McNutt (Technical Coordinator extraordinaire in the Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Management) has agreed to take over management of the UNB-ACWERN website and the banding data, formerly looked after by successive graduate students.

The annual Machias Seal Island Progress Report is now posted on the ACWERN-UNB web site (www.unb.ca/acwern), just scroll down to the bottom of the main page to download the report as a PDF file. Thanks to Alex, Marie-Paule, Travis, Tony and Dorothy for their contributions.

2) Director:

Tony Diamond
Since the fall, I have given presentations on seabird work at Machias Seal Island to the Atlantic Canada Tern Working Group (November), the University of Maine at Orono (January), DFO’s St Andrews Marine Biological Station, and the Pacific Seabird Group (both February). With Emily Mackinnon and Kevin Fraser I met with NB-DNR and UPM-Kymmine and Bird Studies Canada staff to discuss plans for the Bicknell’s Thrush project (January). Recruitment of future graduate students was hampered by funding uncertainty, but I hope to have someone in place for Machias Seal in May and for phalaropes in the fall, and possibly another to study Arctic Terns in the Arctic with Mark Mallory of CWS Iqaluit. Greg McClelland is still expected to start his Ph.D. in September. I continue to review many journal papers and graduate student theses and manuscripts, and plan for my sabbatical in 2008. I also continue work on the Scientific Advisory Committee for New Brunswick Protected Areas, which we hope will generate funding for long-term research in those areas, and the UNB Joint Committee on Mandatory Retirement.

In early March I visited 2 former Ph.D. students, Pete McKinley and John Gunn, in southern Maine: Pete is now Conservation Biologist for New Hampshire Audubon Society, and John is Director of Forest Stewardship and Research for Northeast Forestlands in Hebron, ME. Both find many professional applications for their experience with ACWERN at UNB.

3) Current Students:

Alex Bond
Alex spent the winter finishing up lab work and running lots of mercury and stable isotope samples. With the lab work done, and the latest edition of the MSI report complete, it’s now on to the wonderful world of writing up. In the interim, he has two manuscripts in review (one from his undergraduate thesis on seaduck migration and one from non-thesis-related work on MSI), as well as one in preparation, which is a comprehensive look at mercury levels in seabirds in the Gulf of Maine in collaboration with researchers from New Hampshire, Maine and New Brunswick. Continuing his wayward tendencies (just try to ask him where he’s from!) this summer he gets to play with auklets in Alaska, much to his mother’s dismay.

Travis Clarke
I’ve spent the winter semester taking a graduate research methods course and a GIS ArcView course.  Both are fascinating.  I’ve also recently given my departmental proposal talk for my graduate work and am going to spend the rest of the semester preparing for the upcoming field season.  What time I have leftover will be spent doing some preliminary analysis of my satellite data.

Kevin Fraser
I just recently returned from fieldwork in the cloud forests of Nicaragua, where I am studying altitudinal migration in Catharus mexicanus (Black-crowned Nightingale Thrush) and other resident passerines. Despite close encounters with coral snakes, chiggers, mysterious tropical illness, and mucho gallo pinto (the standard Nicaraguan breakfast of rice and beans), I managed to collect data for my project AND get samples through US customs. Looking forward to my departmental Ph.D. talk (illustrated with some nice pics from Nica) and upcoming fieldwork in Northern New Brunswick, working on the long-distance migration in another Catharus, Swainson's Thrush.

Emily McKinnon
After spending much of first semester applying for funding, I'm now hoping to hear that some applications were successful. Also, I'm working on a couple of courses, ordering field equipment, and day-dreaming about summer field work (72 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes to go!).

Brad Zitske
I have been analyzing my data and writing up this winter with designs on thesis completion by summer/fall.  Attempts to defect to warmer climes to hawk watch have been thwarted by cold temps and snow, but hope is not lost, as I have seen several migrating Golden Eagles and large flocks of Canada Geese interspersed with a few hundred Tundra Swans!

4) Past Students:

André Breton
André is approaching the end of his second (and final?) year as a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Fisheries and Oceans, University of Alaska Fairbanks. After many months spent incorporating a massive radio telemetry dataset into a Microsoft Access database, André’s focus has shifted to data analysis and manuscript writing. He coauthored a short paper that highlights negative and biologically significant effects of radio-transmitters on Tufted Puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) reproductive success (Whidden et al. 2007). A much more detailed manuscript incorporated data from five years (2001-05), six colonies, and 108 adult black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) monitored using automated radio telemetry stations distributed throughout Chiniak Bay, Kodiak Island, Alaska. The main objective of this manuscript and analysis was to determine the role of prey availability as a driver in breeding success experienced by Chiniak Bay kittiwakes. In this context, the prey availability hypothesis is often ‘strongly’ suspected as driving poor breeding success without any direct evidence. Contrasting this view, results of the analysis presented in this manuscript suggests that a collapse in breeding success after 2003 may not have been due to a sharp decline in prey availability. This manuscript was submitted to Ecological Modeling on 30 January 2007. Since the 2007 Pacific Seabird Group Conference, André has been focused on two collaborative manuscripts: one with Karel Allard (recently joined André as a postdoctoral fellow under Dr. Loren Buck) and a second with Dean Kildaw (post doc with Loren Buck). Both of these coauthored manuscripts will incorporate radio telemetry data from the Chiniak Bay, black-legged kittiwake dataset. Stay tuned!

Whidden, S. E., C. Williams, A. R. Breton, & C. L. Buck. In press. Effects of radio-transmitters on Tufted Puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) reproductive success. Journal of Field Ornithology.

Breton, A. R., D. Kildaw, K. Murra, & C. L. Buck. Multilevel models reveal no cohort-level variation in time spent foraging to explain a collapse in kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) breeding success. Submitted to Ecological Modelling on 30 January 2007.

Dorothy Diamond
Dorothy is finishing up a contract for the UNB herbarium, and is teaching a forestry course which tries to get 4th year foresters to design and get a start on their 5th year thesis (a requirement for their degree).  She is looking forward to mist-netting and banding a variety of birds on her property this spring and summer, and is spending the evening hours until the snow melts working on a report which describes 10 year's worth of banding data from her two sites in Fundy National Park.  Hopefully she will find something there to publish.  She really enjoyed meeting fellow ACWERNers Falk Huettmann, Andre Breton, Karel Allard, and Francis Wiese at the February Pacific Seabird Group meeting in Monterey CA.

Sarah Jamieson
I am still working on my PhD at SFU.  I am studying cross-seasonal influences on parental care decisions in Pacific Dunlin.  I have finished up my fieldwork but plan on spending some time this summer helping out on other projects- 2 wks in AK doing wader surveys, 3 weeks on Triangle Island working on murres and tufted puffins, and 2 weeks conducting yellow warbler surveys.  Hopefully I will squeeze in some time to write a thesis.

Julie Paquet
Julie has just returned from maternity leave (daughter Rowan turned one on 18 March 2007) and continues as a wildlife technician at CWS in Sackville. Cael is now 3 years old, and all are doing well. She is now sorting through the 5000 e-mail messages in her inbox!

Ashley Sprague
Ashley recently returned from spending a year in Madagascar working as a marine biologist with a conservation and education related group. She was also featured in the March 17th edition of The Daily Gleaner in Fredericton.

5) Recent Publications:

UNB-56. Betts, M.G., Mitchell, D., Diamond, A.W. and Bety, J.  Uneven rates of landscape change as a source of bias in roadside wildlife surveys. Journal of Wildlife Management. In press.

UNB-58.   Betts, M.G., Forbes, G.J. and Diamond, A.W.  Thresholds in songbird occurrence in relation to landscape structure. Conservation Biology. In press.


View ACWERN Newsletter Vol. 13 Fall 2006 issue