Strawberry Isle Research Projects:
Pelagic Birds and Marine Mammals

Overview

Between the tenth and the twentieth of each month, year round, we charter the 8-metre Boston Whaler "Eco" to run out on a specific transect that starts at the open ocean shore of Clayoquot Sound, runs out 34.5 miles, past the continental shelf to the abyssal plain. The transect is run with the aid of a global position navigational system for accuracy. Birds and marine mammals sighted along the way are entered on a tape recorder by numbers, species, distance from shore, depth and temperature of water. Back at Strawberry Isle the tape is transcribed into a data base then printed out as a report for distribution as described in the introduction.

Methods

Between the tenth and the twentieth of each month, year round, we charter the 8-metre Boston Whaler "Eco" to run out on a specific transect that starts at the open ocean shore of Clayoquot Sound, passes over the whole continental shelf and out 34.5 miles over the abyssal plain. The transect is run with the aid of a global position navigational system for accuracy. Birds and marine mammals sighted along the way are entered on a tape recorder by numbers, species, distance from shore, depth and temperature of water. Back at Strawberry Isle the tape is transcribed into a data base then printed out as a report for distribution as described in the introduction.

Our ideal crew for this work is a boat driver, a competent bird identifier as the port side spotter and a recorder who is also the starboard side spotter. It is usually possible to get a short notice volunteer boat driver but the skeleton crew of two and the data processing is best done in-house by myself and a trained assistant.

The need for this project arose after reading several papers on pelagic (open ocean) birds and realizing that the populations over the entire continental shelf had seldom been recorded much less on a year round basis. The bulk of the existing work had been done by Dr. Ken Morgan and Dr. Allen Burger. These people were contacted for advice on how the data could help them and how best to record it. Although this study was initially intended to monitor birds, the abundance of marine mammals prompted us to include the mammals.