Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 07/09/2009 - 11:01

HI Tom! Greetings from Maryland! I wondered if you will be mapping your location(s) via Google map or some other method so we can follow you around. Love the photos! Becky Bell

Tom Harten

Hi Becky,
Great to hear from you! I plan on putting some maps up showing the location of St. Paul in the Bering Sea as well as my route there from Maryland. I'd like to also put up some maps of the island itself showing the important locations for bird nesting sites and other important sightings.
I'm expecting to have some great things to share with Maryland educators when I get back!
Tom

Becky

Hi Tom- Back at 'cha. I hope all is going well. It is over 90 degrees here, so enjoy it while you have it. Do you all work in shifts? What are your day- to-day duties? Becky

Thomas Harten

webmaster@polartrec.com wrote:Hi Becky,
Thanks for writing!
I'm definitely am appreciating the cool weather here and I'm not looking
forward to 90 degrees and hurricane season ramping up in the east!
The neat thing out here is that each day is different. For some of the
work, all four of the seabird telemetry team are out in the field.
Usually when we are catching the birds. The timing of what we do is
very dependent upon weather and tides. We don't like to catch adult
birds when it is raining, because that exposes the chick to the
elements. If the tide is high, it makes it difficult to access some of
the areas where we are tagging the birds. So we carefully watch the
twice daily weather updates and pay attention to the tide table posted
prominently next to the dining room table.
For the feeding observations we do work in shifts. The workday is
sunrise to sunset, roughly 7:00 am to almost midnight (getting shorter
each day, of course). If everyone is available, we break it down to
about a four hour shift.
Pretty soon, we'll start working on murres, which will involve some
similar and some different methodologies. It's really been a fantastic
experience!
Talk to you soon,
Tom