Biological reserves creation

The project's goal is to create two reserves with optimal conditions for seabirds nesting. Our aims are to restore their natural ecosystem and we pretend to remove all the exotic species, and create the first endemic forest.

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.

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.

The peddy paper was a great success!!

One week ago, we organize a Peddy paper with the youth of Corvo. We show them how is the daily work of the team.
Children and technicians enjoyed the activities in each point, such as: using GPS to recover wax blocks used to track rodents, identification of endemic, native and exotic plants that are growing on Corvo, and visit a Cory's shearwater colony, among other things...
This week we will post a little video with such activities.
Don't miss it!!!

Tests to anti-predator fence follow the right track!

As we wrote before, in early March had put a couple of wild mice Mus musculus into the area to test the anti-predators fence. Action that proved the effectiveness of our fence as a barrier to this species. Not so good results we had at the end of March to test the fence in relation to trasposability by cats.

fig. 1 - Ship rat Rattus rattus

Last Saturday we started testing whether the fence would work as an effective barrier to another species of predator introduced in Corvo Island - the Ship rat Rattus rattus (fig. 1). Once again the fence has proven effective. And our new tenant appears to be quite relaxed in their new home. Today we left another ship rat into the area to demonstrate the true effectiveness of the fence (fig. 2).

fig. 2 - Ship rat Rattus rattus

Meanwhile we have started improving our fence to test whether it can effectively contain cats as well.

Regards to all.