The first half year of the Arctic Barnies project has past, and time has been going fast indeed. The Barnacle Geese have spend the short winter and warm spring on the Dutch staging grounds, where a large part of the population is still residing. Large numbers of Barnacle Geese have already arrived at the staging sites in the Baltic, also among our experimental set-up on Gotland, Sweden. The geese are still grazing, their last preparations before leaving for the breeding grounds in Arctic Russia. And we are almost ready as well to fly to our study site, the breeding grounds in Tobseda, Russia!
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| Barnacle Geese at the Open-top chamber setup on Gotland, SE |
Part of the fieldwork has already started, in the form of the Msc internship of Femke Jochems. We have placed experimental set-ups on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog, one of the main wintering areas for the Barnacle Geese, from early March onwards. We use so-called 'Open-top chambers', which warm up vegetation by aprox. 1 degree Celcius, on the grazing grounds of the geese, in order to study how gras growing peaks will advance under climate warming. The Barnacle Geese time their migration according to these growing peaks of their food plants, and warming in the future might also change the timing of the geese. The fieldwork consists of long days lying on our belly in the field, doing grass counts to measure biomass. Sometimes cold, but very meditative.
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| Open-top chambers and control plots on Schiermonnikoog, NL |
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| Counting grass is fun! |
By conducting this experiment also on the Baltic staging site on Gotland and the breeding site in Tobseda, we can compare the advancement of growing peaks along the migratory fly-way. This means that in early April, we have taken the long drive from the Netherlands to Gotland, to place our experimental set-up with the help of Mattias Andersson and Johannes Esberg. They are currently still busy doing measurements, which has also been noted by the local newspaper!
The first Barnacle Geese have already participated in this project, 10 captive geese which have been trying our GPS-loggers in the aviaries at the NIOO in Wageningen. These GPS-loggers can track GPS positions of the geese, which are transmitted to a radio receiver in the field. In addition, they can track movement which we can use to predict behaviour, using an accelerometer. We'll be equiping Barnacle Geese on the breeding grounds with these GPS-loggers in order to track their migration. Wolbert van den Broek, who is conducting a short internship at the NIOO, has filmed the Barnacle Geese equiped with the loggers and followed them on the meadow, in order to link certain types of behaviour (walking, sleeping, eating) to the data collected by the accelerometer. We can use this to identify behaviour of the wild geese which will carry the GPS-loggers, and in this way collect information on the way the geese spend their time during the year.
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| Femke handles one of the tame Barnacle Geese |
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| Using film and the accelerometer together shows behaviour of the geese |
The clock is ticking, and at the end of this month we'll be landing in Tobseda, where we hope to arrive together with the Barnacle Geese. Then the real work starts: we'll monitor the nests of the geese and catch the female geese in order to equip them with the GPS-loggers.
