Looking for cats and who look at them!

As mentioned previously, last month we began monitoring the activities of cats around the colonies of Cory's shearwater. For this we use automatic cameras with infra-red sensor. This work results in a few thousand pictures every 2 weeks that need to be processed. This is where you can be really helpful.

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

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

Cheers!

Starting with mice monitoring!

One more step has been done as soon as the new year came. We started monitoring 3 wild mice populations on Corvo Island. At the first year we are managing to get general mice abundance values and understand possible variations around one full year. Our main aim, at this point, is to define periods of time when occur higher and lower population numbers.

To approach this aim, we setted down 3 capture grids: one at project reserve, another one at high altitude and a third one at low altitude and under any kind of ecological management.



I fell free to tell you guys that our captures are going well.

To keep going with this work we still waiting and praying to rats Sherman traps arrive, so we can do the same work with rats.

Looks like Corvo inhabitants can keep labelling us "The rats guys".

Cory's shearwater nest monitoring

We monitored 240 nests in a weekly basis since the begginning of May. Out of those 180 were occupied and we had 125 eggs layed. Since hatching predation of chicks by cats and rats has been high and only about 65% of the birds survived so far, with at least a month to go still for fledging.

To detect predators we deployed some motion sensor triggered cameras

Pedro