On Thursday morning we had the chance to go out on the refuge with Matt, one of the Whooping Crane researchers. (They are also called crane techs, but that sounds like they are going out to do maintenance on animatronic cranes.) One of the things they do is survey locations where cranes have been to try to ascertain what habitat they have been browsing on.
Of the 200+ cranes that winter here, about 25 of them have GPS tags that report when and where they are. Matt and Sarah download this data and choose some of the recent points to survey. They go out to each point and record the habitat data. This sometimes requires hip boots. We brought them along, but didn't need them.
We helped Matt with the data collection, mostly holding a Robel Pole and recording measurements. He lays out out a 50 meter North/South-East/West grid centered on the crane's GPS location and records the density of the vegetation along every five meter grid line. He also photographs a panorama from the center point and recorded the types of vegetation at each five meter intersection point using a quadrat (a plastic square which seemed to be about .5 meters per side. It went pretty quickly with one of us holding the pole and the other recording the data as Matt called it out.
We managed to do a couple of points that were selected. We couldn't get to a couple of others which were on the other side of tidal pool that was too deep for our UTV to cross.
We saw no cranes, although they are usually out in the area we went to. Matt surmised that they had all relocated to the section that had been burned over the day before in a prescribed burn. The bugs and small animals that get burned over are like a big buffet for the birds and they are all smart enough to appear after a burn.
After lunch we went back to our task of inspecting fire extinguishers and first aid kits, this time in as many of the refuge vehicles as we could find. We were pretty successful and there are less than a handful left to inspect.
Yesterday and today we drove down to Port Aransas to their annual Whooping Crane festival. This is a birding festival centered on the cranes. Many of the activities at the festival are birding tours of some sort either by boat out to bay and islands or by vehicle to local hot spots. We were interested in some of the workshops and lectures. Yesterday we were a bit disappointed that the workshops that we were interested in were already fully booked, so after strolling through the small vendor show and a short optics presentation, we headed off to Corpus Christi, another 20 miles down the road to find a market called Sprouts, which, from its marketing, seemed very similar to Whole Foods. We found it, but it was okay, but it was no Whole Foods. They had most of what we wanted for this week's grocery shopping, but it isn't worth making a special trip to. The Rockport H-E-B is a better choice for the weekly shop.
Today we returned to Port Aransas for a series of festival lectures at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute (UTMSI), two in the morning and two in the afternoon. In the morning we heard Joan Garland of the International Crane Foundation talk about the efforts to create a second migrating flock of Whooping Cranes that summer in Wisconsin and winter in Florida. It has been difficult but they seem to be succeeding using hand raised cranes (using crane suits so they don't imprint on humans as their parents) and using ultra-light aircraft to lead them on their first migration.
The second morning talk was by Larry Nitto, a nature photographer who presented a collection of photos of birds and other wildlife and nature photographs. He explained the techniques used to create each image. It was interesting to learn some of the techniques and tricks used by the pros.
After lunch, we did a little birding at the UTMSI Wetland Education Center, a man-made wetland right next to the beach. There were snowy egrets, great blue herons, brown pelicans and the ubiquitous yellow-rumped warbler along the edges, but the bird-of-the-day was a loggerhead shrike, sitting on a branch looking out at Aransas Pass.
The afternoon began with the keynote speaker, Dr. George Archibald, Co-founder of the International Crane Foundation. He talked about the worldwide species of cranes and preserving them and their habitats, particularly in Ethiopia, Korea and Mongolia. He talked at length of work in both South and North Korea trying to preserve the Red-crowned Crane, the second rarest species after the Whooping Crane.
The final speaker we heard was Tony Amos, a member of the UTMSI staff, who talked about the 30+ years of almost daily data collection of the numbers of shorebirds, detritus and people on the beach in specific coastal strips of Mustang and San Jose Islands. His data has documented the long-term changes in shorebird populations, mostly to their detriment. His data is detailed to the locations of specific birds and he has tracked individual plovers who have returned over many years, some for more than a decade.
After a stop for dinner in Rockport. We'd planned to stop at Alby's seafood for their recommended oysters, but were a few minutes too late. We ended up with our first Texas BBQ. The Shack's Smokehouse and Seafood was the place. Mostly smokehouse, little seafood...and pretty funky. We went with chopped brisket for Ellen and Ribs for me. I forgot that ribs in Texas means beef ribs and received two huge ones. They were good, as was Ellen's brisket, and this wasn't even the best place in town.
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