In five weeks time Amy and I might be forgiven for not wanting to hear another Manx shearwater for a while! We are about to undertake a project for our RSPB Conservation Science department which will involve repeated playback of male calls, female calls and a mix of the two to 100 study burrows. Shearwaters are difficult birds to census given their nocturnal, burrow nesting habits. Part of the process involves playing the call to burrows and using the level of response to help estimate the popultion
It is this 'response rate' we are investigating to try and find out what combination of calls produce the best call back rate and hence make future population estimates more robust. It will be an interesting few weeks as male birds tend to only call back to male calls (but some will call back to females) while females only ever call back to females (or so we think!) and if both are calling at the same time then who knows?!
Today we spent a pleasant day marking 100 burrows to use in the study and will report back on our progress over the coming weeks.
Amy next to burrow B8 - the study burrows are spread out over 6 plots with 3 on the east coast and 3 on the west coast