Red-footed Booby Day

This morning I did my Red-footed Booby plots. This entails checking 197 existing nests for eggs or chicks and watching for new nests with an egg. I have 8 plots and all of the nests are numbered and nobody is happy to have me near so the noise and confusion of birds is pretty intense. It is not easy to decide which nest is which number so there is a lot of thinking and mental mapping. That took about 3 hours this morning and then this afternoon all 4 of us counted every Red-footed Booby nest on the island and tipped the owner with a stick to see if it was sitting on an egg or a chick. This totaled about 1300 nests so I've seen more Red-footed Boobys today than I wanted to. Some of the nests in my plots had chicks this afternoon that were eggs this morning so that was interesting. Red-tailed Tropicbird plots tomorrow in the morning and more night work tomorrow night.