As promised, a brief update now that we have downloaded some of the tracking data. Liz, Richard and Catherine managed an amazing 15 out of 15 retrievals with the data loggers! After a long afternoon and evening re-trapping our masked boobies, they had a night walk back out from Letterbox and arrived back at to a Landrover shrouded in fog.
One of the birds making a guest appearance was Rocky - a slightly confused male who spent several weeks incubating a rock, and by some miracle had an egg with his rock by the time we left. We think he stole it (grin).
The data collected will help us start to understand how the seabirds use the oceans around Ascension and further afield, and point us in the right direction for setting up Marine Protected Areas. Obviously a sample of 15 is small, but funding is being sought to do much more extensive work in the next few years. Here's where Rocky went while not incubating his rock.
For the moment, that's it for our Ascension adventures. I'll make sure that anything exciting happening with the decoys ends up here on the blog - so fingers crossed (although I was slightly disappointed to learn that it can take years to set up a colony - patience was never one of my strong points).
A final thank you to everyone in the Conservation Department on Ascension, Liz and Richard, Nigel and Andrew who built the sound systems, and Ian in the IS department who saved our bacon when we needed some software while on-island. And especially to Emily who turned me into a blog-convert.
Signing out,Ian