Vol. 9 (Fall 2003)
This newsletter gives us updates from the Senior Chair Tony Diamond, as well as from past, present and new ACWERN students. This newsletter is intended to promote communication and sharing of knowledge among students, chairs, graduates and collaborators in the Atlantic Cooperative Wildlife Ecology Research Network. For email contact information about students email Mathieu Charette.
1. News from Tony
2.
New Students
3. Post-docs and Current Students
4. Alumni News
5. Publications
The summer was divided between
field trips to Machias Seal Island (long-term seabird research and graduate
student projects of Kate Devlin and Mathieu Charette), Fundy National
Park (Matt Betts' research project, and songbird monitoring by MAPS with
ACWERN graduate and banding officer Dorothy McFarlane), Country Island
N.S. (for Mathieu Charette's project) and Labrador (Neal Simon's research
project); reviewing thesis chapters from the many students writing up;
recruiting 3 new M.Sc. students (Amie Black, Ashley Sprague, and Laura
Minich); examining Ph.D. theses by John Gunn and Pete McKinley; and preparing
for fall meetings. The first paper from the MSI work was published, as
was the second from Neal's M.Sc work and another from Diana Hamilton's
shorebird work. He has spent two weeks in the U.K. in August, and in September
delivered a paper and chaired a session at the 27th Annual Meeting of
the Waterbird Society in Cuiaba, Brasil. In October he will chair the
Boreal Forest session at the Society of Canadian Ornithologists' Meeting
in Saskatoon, and participate in the Annual Meeting of AquaNet (the Network
of Centres of Excellence in AquaCulture) to which Mark Dionne's project
contributes.
Amie Black
Amie Black has just started a Masters degree with Dr. Tony Diamond. She has spent the last two summers as a field assistant on Machias Seal Island for Kate Devlin in 2002, and Mathieu Charette in 2003. She is now planning her own project to examine the differences in feeding areas of Arctic Terns (Sterna paradisaea) and Common Terns (Sterna hirundo) in the Bay of Fundy/Gulf of Maine region. She is planning to use radio tagging to try and track the terns during the chick rearing stage. She is happy to hear from anyone who may have feedback or input on her project.
Laura Minich
Laura Minich will be looking at feeding data that have been collected over the past 10 years on Machias Seal Island for four species of seabirds, Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) and Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea), Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica), and Razorbill (Ulca torda). She is hopeful that her project will evolve into a comparison of foraging guilds and an investigation into how the species respond to changes in fish availability. Things changedaily, so stay posted.
Ashley Sprague
Ashley Sprague is beginning
an Msc. under the co-supervision of Tony Diamond and Diana Hamilton. She
will be researching the movement and feeding activities of Semi-palmated
Sandpipers (Calidris pusilla) relative to abundance of their main prey,
Corophium volutator, on mudflats in the upper Bay of Fundy. Next summer,
radio-telemetry will be used to identify movement patterns of individual
birds during their staging period in the area. Extensive surveys of Corophium
populations will be conducted to determine the factors that influence
prey selection.
3) POST DOCS
& CURRENT STUDENTS:
Karel Allard
Karrel Allard's big news of
course, is the birth in August of their second child, Emanuel. Both he
and Rafaelle (now two years old), are doing well. Rafaelle is amazing
her parents by not expressing jealousy of any sort towards her little
brother (not at all what they expected...). Much of Karel's energy is
curently devoted to figuring out how to juggle kids, relationship and
thesis (much more difficult than he ever could have imagined...). In terms
of thesis, the past year has been devoted to data compilation and exploration
along with some writing. He's excited by the fact that chapters are starting
to come together and fall into place.
This past summer (well before Emanuel's due date...), he spent nearly a month at Cape Vera on Devon Island laying groundwork for future studies of fulmars, gulls and eiders. He worked closely with Mark Mallory of the CWS and a terrific team, consisting of keen Inuit assistants from Arctic College as well as contractors and students. On nearby Saint Helena Island, they captured, marked and measured 19 Thayer's Gull adults (more than doubling the world total of individuals ever banded on breeding grounds), 11 Glaucous Gull (Larus glaucescens) adults and 40 Common Eider (Somateria mollissima) hens. Capture was no easy feat, as for the most part both gull species nest on cliffs and spires. They used Jean-Michel Devink's capture tactics, which proved to be invaluable, and gathered data on moult and reproduction. The ultimate goal is to establish a location for the study of gulls and eiders that mirrors the East Bay site, but at a much higher latitude.
Nicola Benjamin
Nikki Benjamin's M.Sc. thesis
project, for those of you who may not know or remember, is investigating
questions of diet in two species of gull which breed in the Bay of Fundy,
Herring Gull (Larus argentatus) and Great Black-backed Gull (Larus marinus).
She has completed field and course work and is slowly plugging away at
data analysis. She should be getting into some writing soon, as well.
Progress has been slow, due to some personal difficulties, but thanks
to Tony's patience and support, things are looking much more hopeful for
this fall and winter.
Matthew Betts
Matthew Betts continues to
work on his Ph.D., which examines the influence of
landscape context on reproductive activity and survival of forest songbirds.
This past spring (2003) was his final field season in the Fundy region
(of
course he said that last year). The objective of the fourth field season
was to collect data on forest bird re-occupancy rates in fragmented versus
unfragmented landscapes and to increase the number of resight data for
use
in survival analysis.
The second chapter of Matt's
Ph.D. is being published in the October 2003
issue of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research: Betts, M., S. Franklin
and
R. Taylor. Interpretation of landscape pattern and habitat change for
local
indicator species using satellite imagery and geographic information system
data in New Brunswick, Canada.
As a recent recipient of an
NSERC PGSB scholarship, Matt is now working as a
full time student, although part of his time will still be spent with
the
Greater Fundy Ecosystem Research Group. Matt's wife Karen, is a new member
of the Canadian National Mountain Bike Team.
Joel Bety
Last summer, Joel Bety had another great field season working on eiders in the Canadian Arctic although it was a "bearrrrry" summer at East Bay...(25 observations of polar bears, some very close encounters and tents destroyed by bears!). Joel recently got an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship and should move to Vancouver in January to work with Tony Williams (Simon Fraser University). His little daughter is growing fast and is still smiling most of the time!
Brenda Blynn
Brenda Blynn is writing-up her M.Sc. thesis titled 'Distribution of Common Eider during brood-rearing on mainland New Brunswick and Grand Manan Island'. After doing two field seasons in the Bay of Fundy, she is currently working on text from Northern California. She will be attending the 3rd North American Duck Symposium from 5-9 Nov. in Sacramento, CA.
André Breton
Most exciting on Andre Breton's list of activities since the last newsletter would certainly be attending the Program MARK Workshop at Colorado State University in Fort Collins; the workshop covered the week of 2 June 2003. For those not aware of program MARK, this is the latest in state-of-the-art software for analyzing Capture-Mark-Resight/Recapture/or Recovery (CMR; MARK also handles telemetry data) data; in general, MARK offers to users an environment to construct and later compare competing models and finally estimate parameters of interest (e.g., survival rates or population size); for the most inquisitive readers, model selection is guided by Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) and related statistics while parameter estimates are maximum likelihoods (MLE) (an excellent resource is Burnham and Anderson 2002).
After the workshop, he took
advantage of being two-thirds of the way across North America by continuing,
by motorcycle across Colorado and eventually to the Pacific Ocean near
San Francisco, and then back to Fredericton. Currently, he is working
on the second of three papers planned for his thesis; the theme of this
paper is emigration and the aim is twofold: (1) determine in which year
birds "settle" using settling rates (interannual movement probabilities
which decline as Atlantic puffin mature) estimated from CMR
data in MARK and (2) estimate emigration rates as simple proportions corrected
by resighting rates that are less than one.
Burnham, K. P., and D. R. Anderson. 2002. Model Selection and Multi-model Inference: A practical information-theoretic approach, 2nd ed. Springer, New York.
Mathieu Charette - UNB ACWERN Student Representative
Mathieu Charette has finished collecting data on Country Island (CI) NS and Machias Seal Island (MSI) and is currently in the process of preparing his stable isotope samples. Stable isotope samples of feathers, blood, eggs and fish prey will be analyzed to compare diet of Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) and Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea) on CI and MSI. These data will be combined with traditional feeding observations to compare diet to breeding parameters of both species of terns on the two islands.
The MSI crew is currently preparing the annual Machias Seal Island report, which hopefully will be ready sometime in November. Mathieu is currently preparing a poster with Tony Diamond to be presented at the Society of Canadian Ornithologists (SCO) in October. The poster title is "Attracting Roseate Terns (Sterna dougallii) to Machias Seal Island, NB using social stimulants." Social stimulants where placed at two sites on the island to attract Roseate Terns to the island - no luck this year. They were heard flying around the colony throughout the breeding season, but did not breed. The project will be continued again next year.
Kate Devlin
Kate Devlin has been combining
her research and writing with teaching. Last winter she
taught Ethology, a lecture based upper level undergraduate class. She
plans to teach the
same course this winter. Over the summer she spent 2 months on Machias
Seal Island
collecting a last season of data and helping the crew get their feet on
the ground. In July
she left MSI to come back to Fredericton. Boy the mainland is a strange
place to be in the summer! Since then she's been writing and in the lab
searching for Arctic Tern
microsatellites, hasn't found them yet but hopes to have some positive
results by the
ACWERN meeting in November!
Marc Dionne
Marc is currently in Quebec City writing up his Master's thesis, which is planned to be completed this semester. Below is the abstract of his project.
Mussel aquaculture on Prince
Edward Island started in the 1970's, with rapid expansion
occurring in the past decade. In recent years, during migration periods,
interactions
between diving ducks (mainly Greater Scaup (Aythya marila) and Long-Tailed
Duck (Clangula hyemalis)) and cultivated mussels have increased. Using
existing duck survey data, we quantified the relationship between ducks
and the industry. Diving duck abundance has increased concurrently with
mussel landings over the years. Increases in duck numbers took place mainly
in areas where mussel aquaculture intensity is high. We also assessed
duck predation on an experimental culture site in which mussels were socked
in different seed sizes, densities and socking materials. We tested a
protective socking material, a non-disruptive technique that could prevent
duck predation and foster peaceful co-existence between waterfowl and
mussel aquaculture. Ducks were size-selective, clearly avoiding the large
seed. On unprotected socks, they ate 80-95% of small seed and 60-80% of
mid-sized seed. On protected socks, they ate 75-90% of small seed and
50% of medium seed, indicating that the protective material was ineffective
for small seed and only partially effective for medium seed. A survey
of damage at a commercial mussel farm in 2001 revealed similar evidence
of selectivity. Relative mussel growth in
protected and unprotected socks is currently being analyzed.
Sarah Jamieson
Sarah Jamieson had a fun summer full of hiking, ultimate frisbee, soccer, and softball, and oh yeah! thesis writing. Her thesis is almost ready to go out to her committee. WAHOO! Her coolest finding was that unlike many bird species, eiders lose protein during spring migration. Her theory is that they do this so that they can gain fat but not overall weight, which may be important for a species that faces wing loading issues.
She also won the geek lottery, she received an NSERC PGS-B for her PhD. She is still in the process of trying to figure out where to go, but she is thinking about the west coast.
Her autumn will be consisting of a lot of traveling. She is supposed to spend 3-4 weeks in Ontario doing some work at the avian energetics lab, then one week in California at the Duck Symposium, and if she can fit it in, 2 weeks in Denmark studying with Godfred Høpner Petersen from the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen. He is the mollusc ID'ing god for species found in Greenland. Why the heck is she studying molluscs? her birds eat them!
Catherine Otorowski
The focus of Catherine Otorowski's Masters research is the pollution pathways of total mercury (Hg) and methyl mercury (MeHg) in the Great Black-Backed Gull (Larus marinus) and Herring Gull (Larus argentatus). Gulls serve as high trophic biomagnification indicators of Hg accumulations along the southwestern coast of New Brunswick. Here, atmospheric inputs of Hg are higher than further inland due to incoming air masses from central Canada, Eastern U.S.A., and overseas carrying airborne Hg into the region. Also, Coastal fog retention is expected to further increase the transfer of atmospheric Hg into coastal catchments. This summer she completed one field season and is now in the process of analyzing her samples at the UNB COMERN (Collaborative Mercury Research Network) laboratory.
Neil Simon
Neal Simon still occupies the
position of Ecosystem Ecologist for Labrador, employed by the Department
of Forest Resources & Agrifoods of Newfoundland and Labrador. The
field research for his Ph.D. was completed in the summer of 2002 but he
is actively involved in four additional projects as part of his duties
as Ecologist. 1) The effect of harvest method (strip-cut or clear-cut)
and season (summer and winter) on soil disturbance and plant regeneration
in central Labrador, 2) A multi-scale evaluation of plant community structure
following clearcut logging and wildfire in southeastern Labrador, 3) Effect
of post-fire salvage logging on songbirds in western Labrador, 4) Post-fire
secondary succession of vegetation in western Labrador.
Neal has recently published a second paper from his M.Sc. thesis which
was completed in 1998 entitled: Simon, N.P.P., Diamond, A.W., Schwab,
F.E. 2003. Do northern forest bird communities show more ecological plasticity
than southern forest bird communities in eastern Canada? Écoscience
10:298-296.
Tara Warren
Tara Warren is defending in the next couple of weeks, the title of her thesis being "A multiple-scale investigation of cavity-nesting bird habitat in an industrial forest". She is now busy and excited with her new program in Education at UNB.
Lasha Young
Lasha Young is currently in the committee-review process for her MSc.F. Her thesis examined habitat use by Blackburnian Warblers at multiple spatial scales in an Acadian forest. She spent the summer of 2000 and 2001 living in Fundy National Park. She is currently in the process of preparing a couple of papers based on her thesis and is looking for a job in Western Canada.
She spent the first part of
this summer writing her thesis and the second part
wakeboarding in Northern Alberta. She is currently living in Fredericton
but is looking
forward to moving onto the next stage of her life.
3) ALUMNI NEWS:
Jean-Michel DeVink
Jean-Michel DeVink has settled
into an MSc Biology program at the University of Saskatchewan after finishing
his BSc Forestry at UNB with Antony Diamond.
Working with Dr. Bob Clark of the Canadian Wildlife Service they will
be comparing Selenium and Mercury levels, body condition and breeding
status of Lesser
Scaup, Ring-necked Ducks, and White-winged Scoters from the western Canadian
boreal forest. He will be presenting a poster at the 3rd annual duck symposium
of work done while part of the ACWERN group entitled "Effects of
Water Salinity on Growth and Survival of Common Eider Ducklings (Somateria
mollissima)."
Chantal Gagnon
Chantal Gagnon worked for Jacques Whitford Environment Ltd., an environmental
consulting firm, for a year after finishing her B.Sc. in 2001. Since she
has returned to University to do her Masters degree. She started her M.Sc.
in January at the University of Saskatchewan under the supervision of
Dr. Keith A. Hobson. Her project focuses on using stable isotope analysis
to examine migration, diet and the ecophysiology of Myrtle Warblers. The
fieldwork is conducted at the Delta Marsh Bird Observatory in southern
Manitoba during spring and fall migration periods. She was awarded an
NSERC PGS-A Scholarship and the Isabel Lopez Memorial Scholarship from
U of S.
John Gunn
John Gunn is still with SmartWood
and has been conducting FSC certification audits and
assessments throughout the northeast US, and most recently a big assessment
in the East Kootenays of British Columbia. His grant funded work is coming
to an end in November, so he decided to start up an ecological consulting
business here in Maine. He's got a couple jobs lined up already and is
excited about the prospect of a diversity of projects. He will be continuing
to do his FSC certification work, but will be working with landowners
and landtrusts to help them with management planning and conservation
strategies. He still see's Pete McKinley frequently - they haven't found
any place that serves samosas and Picaroons on Wednesday nights, but they're
still looking! John and his wife have been living in a log home in the
foothills of the White Mountains for the last three years - which is the
longest he's had a single address since high school - so it looks like
they're settling down somewhere.
Falk Huettmann
Falk has now moved from his
position as a Killam PostDoc on 'Grizzly Bear Future Habitat Modelling'
with the Geography Department, University of Calgary, to a tenure-track
position as Assistant Professor for Wildlife Ecology with the University
of Alaska, Fairbanks, U.S. He is now in the process of setting-up a Spatial
Data-Analysis lab and research program in order to investigate Wildlife-,
Land- and Seascape Ecology questions with GIS, Remote Sensing and various
Modelling Techniques. Before his move, Falk
studied this August on the Kurile Islands, Russian Far East, where he
is still puzzled about his documented Japanese Murrelet sightings and
other fascinating species and research topics. Falk participated this
year with his GIS Modelling work in NCEAS Modelling Workshops, held in
St. Barbara, California. If you want to contact him for research ideas,
projects etc., his new address is: Falk Huettmann, Assistant Professor,
Biology and Wildlife Dept., Institute of Arctic Biology, University of
Alaska-Fairbanks AK 99775-7000 USA, email fffh@uaf.edu, tel. 907 474 7671
Dorothy McFarlane
Dorothy has worked for the Nature Trust of New Brunswick which held a
first-ever NB Land Conservation Conference this past spring; she then
did some intensive bird surveys for Jacques Whitford Env. Ltd, and continued
running two M.A.P.S. bird banding stations in Fundy National Park (her
eighth year). In keeping with her philosophy of life-long learning, she
is now employed in the UNB Herbarium entering the data on 55,500 plant
specimens into an on-line database and learning the latin names of all
NB plants. Her future projects include researching bird mortality at a
new cell phone tower in Fundy Park, teaching a bird ID course, and being
responsible for managing banding data for UNB ACWERN. She continues to
be the Editor of Picoides, the bulletin of the Society of Canadian Ornithologists.
Membership in this worthy group is $15 a year for students and is open
to everyone. She recently returned from Brazil, where she helped judge
the posters at the Annual Meeting of the Waterbird Society, in addition
to enjoying some fantastic birding. She will be attending the SCO meeting
in Saskatoon where she hopes to meet up with former ACWERN students and
colleagues.
Flemming Merkel
Fleming Merkel's family is
now counting five. His wife Janne gave birth to a baby girl
named Luna in September. After a 2-hour labour Janne gave birth to a 3960
g and 53 cm healthy girl.
Julie Paquet
Julie Paquet is still working
as Wildlife Technician for CWS Sackville. She
continues to enjoy her work, which sent her to Cuba this winter to help
with
research on wintering Bicknell's Thrush. She is also very involved within
the environmental movement, serving on the Canadian Environmental Network
National Council and also working at the grassroots level. She is now
preparing to be a mom and will be taking a year off work beginning this
November. She will let everybody know when the big day arrives!
Cameron Stevens
Cameron Stevens finished his
field work this summer and plans to move on and away from U of A very
soon. To where and for what, he doesn't know, and depends on how well
he writes and publishes. He's completed 3 chapters and submitted 2 of
these so far but the big data papers are still to come. His is still very
proud of his dog which chased or treed 25 bears this summer. Pretty good
bear spray! Go Oilers!
Hamilton, D.J., Barbeau, M.A.
and Diamond, A.W. 2003. Shorebirds, Snails, and Corophium in the Upper
Bay of Fundy: Predicting Bird Activity on Intertidal Mudflats. Canadian
Journal of Zoology 81: 1358-1366.
Diamond, A.W. and Devlin, C.M. 2003. Seabirds as indicators of changes
in marine ecosystems: ecological monitoring on Machias Seal Island. Environmental
Monitoring and Assessment 88: 153-175.
Simon, N.P.P., Diamond, A.W. and Schwab, F.E. 2003. Do northern forest
bird communities show more ecological plasticity than southern forest
bird communities in eastern Canada? Ecoscience 10(3): 289-296.
