A birdwatching day

Last week, despite the gray sky with a promise of a rainy day, we decided to enjoy the recreation that attracts many tourists from northern and central Europe to Corvo Island, the Birdwatching.
Telescope, 3 binoculars, bird guide and a backpack full of good mood is the material needed to spend a relaxed evening in Caldeirão, the ex libris of Corvo.

We took our visit to count birds for the National Waterfowl Wintering Program conducted by the 2nd consecutive year here on Corvo. By late morning our list was:
2 Grey Herons Ardea cinerea1 Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago 
29 Mallard Anas platyrhynchos 
40 Yellow Legged Gull Larus cachinnans 
1 American Black Duck Anas rubripes 

1 hybrid of Mallard x American Black Duck

Despite the rain and gray sky, was a morning well spent.

The Cory's shearwater activity: dataloggers

Logger work is not knew for SPEA and in the scope of the Marine IBA Life project we have used several troughout the islands of Azores, Madeira and in the Mainland. SPEA is currently working with Coimbra University in yet another project to identify with more detail the foraging areas of Cory's shearwaters and what may influence them. In these videos we can witness the deployment of small GPS devices that can last longer than 15 days and that will be essential for Filipe Ceia to know these seabird movements at sea for his Phd thesis.

Monitoring activities in Vila Franca islet

Cory's shearwater breeding success

To understand how the Cory's Shearwater population of Corvo is evolving over the years, we are monitoring six different sub-colonies aiming to estimate their breeding success.

Corvo receives lots of visitors...

Last week the Scientific comission visited Corvo Islands and evaluated the project actions. During the meeting it was discussed in what way the methods used can be improved and how we should proceed to the data treatment.

The visits were very profitable and resulted in various valuable sugestions and ideas to improve the project actions. We managed to visit all the project intervention areas, although the winter days are coming. In between rain and strong winds we were lucky enough to catch some sunny moments to visit the altitude reserve and show the "Caldeirão" to the Comission.


Beside the project team, the meeting counted with the presence of Jaime Ramos (University of Coimbra), Manuel Nogales (CSIC), Steffen Oppel (RSPB), Raquel Ferreira (SRAM) and Joaquim Teodósio (SPEA).

On Monday the strong wind forecast made us fear the worst, but finally the plane managed to land and all our visitors departed. We hope that they manage to come back soon enough and to help us again.

Abundance estimate of rodents on Cory's shearwater colonies

Every month the team sets up a trap grid for rats and mice at the Cory's shearwater colonies. trough this capture/recapture method we can monitor the population of rodents and know their densities and home ranges.

Wild cats detection with surveillance cameras

The project has 17 surveillance cameras that are used to analyze the variation in the abundance of wild cats among different colonies.
Every two weeks a technician visits the colonies to check and move each camera to a new capture point.

Cat census in Corvo island

The project team monthly conducted a series of activities to monitor the cat population on the island.
This summer, with the cooperation of the Corvo inhabitants, we made a campaign consisted on the neutering of all the domestic cats inthe village and to tag them with a small identification microchip.
This campaign is necessary to prevent the increase of the feral cat population in the near future.

Trying to get further help!

As mentioned previously, we are monitoring cat activity around the colonies of Cory's shearwater using automatic cameras with infra-red sensor. This work results in lots of pictures that need to be processed. This is where you can be really helpful. It is a great help even if you can spend just a couple of hours per week.

The processing can be done from your home and you just need an internet connection and the Microsoft Excel program. Below is an example of one of the cat pictures recorded last week.

If you are interested, get in touch to receive more information.
Just comment on this post or send an email to nuno.oliveira@spea.pt.

Cheers!