A black-crowned night heron perches near the lighthouse on Alcatraz Island. Image courtesy of Roger Hothem/USGS.

Some of my great USGS ecology researchers will be giving a free public lecture this Saturday, October 29, 1:30 p.m. PDT in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Science Festival.

Titled “Life and Death on Alcatraz Island: The Secret Life of Nesting Birds on ‘The Rock’” and hosted at 201 Fort Mason by the National Park Service, our biologists will share their knowledge from 20-plus years of research on Alcatraz.

We’ll focus in particular on the black-crowned night-heron, a secretive, twilight hunter that’s particularly useful in environmental contaminant studies, due to its position in the food chain. Additionally, herons have to coexist with nesting gulls and ravens on Alcatraz… and can often end up as raven food.

Interestingly, a lot of these nest monitoring surveys requires the use of remote cameras hooked up to — you guessed it, DVRs. 

So we’ve pretty much got these birds on TiVo and have to sit through a bajillion hours of footage to quantify behavior…

Fun activities for educators and kids include:

  • Owl pellet dissections (from which kids get to keep the bones and goodies), which are similar to what we do to study raven diets.
  • Ask a biologist Q&A session on what field work is like.
  • Field work tools and props that kids can touch and hold, including the remote nest cameras and DVRs that we use to monitor nest behavior.
  • Coloring sheets of some of the seabird species we work with.

For the more advanced geeks, we’ll have some technical posters and reprints of research articles on hand. Some of this data also will be presented at The Wildlife Society 2011 Annual Meeting the following week.

The first-ever Bay Area Science Festival has already made a big splash this week, and USGS will also host other hikes and even science pub crawls later next week. Details at the USGS news release.

Hope to see some of you there on Saturday! Follow at #basf11 and @bayareascience and of course @younglandis.

Advertisement