Day 2

There are more acronyms here than there are in education. Today we did an MIC for Greater Frigate Bird chicks. If I remember correctly it stands for Mean Incubation Count. What that entails is tipping every nesting Frigate Bird on the island and counting all the chicks or eggs that are being incubated. You use a stick about 3 ft. long and put the tip of the stick under the sitting bird and tip them up to see if they have an egg or a chick or nothing underneath. All the while they are clacking their beak at you or biting the stick but they don't leave their nest.It totaled several hundred active nests and at least that many that were empty. It took 4 of us several hours to work through the whole Island for this count. The nesting colonies are all mixed species and some areas are so loud you need to wear earplugs. There will be more new biological work tomorrow on several plots of Red-tailed Tropic bird.