We woke to sunshine this morning after many days of endless grey light. As usual, we started the day off with a nest check (all 124). As usual, we found eggs, birds on eggs, birds on questionmarks, birds on starred eggs (eggs with little star shaped cracks indicating hatching should happen soon)…. AND CHICKS! 4 of them! As Zach says, they are re-chick-ulously cute. As Derek says, the change is most egg-cellent. As for me, I hope the picture speaks for the joy in my heart.
Little auk chicks are basically little black poofballs. They each have a miny white egg-tooth on top of their black bills with which they crack through their eggshells. My job is to stick my scrawny arms into the deep nest crevices and pull of these balls of poof. Then I measure the culmen, depth and head-bill (but carefully, it’s still pretty squishy up in their headspace). Next Zach measures the tiniest wings you can imagine– we’re talking 2.5 mm primary feathers. Take a peek yourself!
Derek takes over from there, measuring their relatively huge feet (”tarsus”). Check him out as he blocks the feisty winds in order to get an accurate weight (Yup, the chick is in that beautiful brightly colored bag). 
Chicks also make the most patheticly adorable mewling noises. It almost speaks to the little mother auk deep inside me and inspires me to dig some copepods from my gular pouch to feed the little guy… just kidding, we don’t eat copepods… we eat sausages!
Also today we scoped manys nests where we will deploy TDRs (time-depth recorders). These give us dive profiles for each bird we can glue them to. In combination with diet samples which we scoop from their gular pouches, we will be able to better understand feeding behaivor. The trick is to catch the same bird twice: once to deploy and twice to retrieve our devices. Soon we will be standing guard outside all these nests armed with binocs and nets. In order to make this job easier, we put colorbands on our TDR birds, as well as giving their breasts a nice coat of multi-colored Sharpie marker. As soon as I get my hands on some photos of these little aukward makeovers, I will be sure to post them!
Until then we will be checking nests everyday for new chicks! Oh my I can’t wait!