Ducks Unlimited Alaska Intern

Howdy folks. Summer is cruising right along and it seems like we have skipped over June. For us, the month was focused around nest island monitoring. We spent 8 days out at camp from the 13th to the 20th monitoring just under 400 islands. The nest island program was started in the 80's to help boost the nesting success of dusky Canada geese. The program placed artificial islands with transplanted sweet gale shrubs on ponds throughout the Copper River Delta. We spent our trip out at camp checking the islands for dusky nests and recording nest fate. We also observed the condition of the islands to see if any maintenance was required. Two common problems that require maintenance are missing anchors or landscaping issues with sweet gale plants. Beavers and other critters can create significant obstacles for establishing shrubs on islands as well as large ponds that create significant wave action. We saw a lot of successful nests as well as some that had been depredated, but all signs

I apologize to my followers as it has been a few weeks since I last wrote a blog post. We spent all of the second and the majority of the third week of May in Forest Service training workshops. We spent weeks three and four in the field, catching up on nest searching, performing nest checks, and conducting eagle surveys. We were lucky enough to catch a break in the rainy weather, enabling the crew to deploy nest-monitoring cameras on 75 different dusky Canada goose nests. Some goose eggs hatched, while others suffered varying forms of depredation. The crew collects the cameras from those nests with already known nest fates, regardless of success or failure, and deploys these cameras on new nests from late nesting or re-nesting geese. Pictured on the left: A dusky Canada goose nest on one of a few hundred artificial nest islands constructed to help the geese avoid terrestrial predators and boost nest success. Pictured on the right: Many dusky Canada geese prefer to utiliz