One of our main goals this season is to deploy Time Depth Recorders (TDRs) on Little Auks. These amazingly small instruments record pressure and temperature and time. To deploy a TDR we find a breeding bird and glue the instrument onto its breast feathers. We mark the bird with permanent ink pens so that we can find it again. The tricky part is recapturing it so that we can remove the TDR and download the data. In the last few days we deployed 9 TDRs and got all of them back (except for one) by spending long hours stacking out birds at their nest sites. We are thrilled to see the profiles of the many dives they make (most to 20 meters!) during one feeding trip. More good news is that all of the birds are feeding their chicks normally after we removed the instruments. The team in Greenland is also deploying TDRs and so are teams in Kongsfjord, Bjorndalen, Bjornoya and Magdalena fjord. It will be a great multi-colony comparison!
Nina deploying a TDR.
The recapture of Mr. Green!