Tag Archives: snow goose

Entangled Sea Lions

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Weather

  • Visibility: 15 Miles
  • Wind: 20-30 NE
  • Sky: Partly cloudy
  • Water: Waves about a metre

Boats/Visitors

  • A few ecotours and fishing boats going by

Maintenance

  • ran the generator and the desalinator, now that we had a good rainfall the cistern is filling up, hopefully start pressure washing more soon
  • The fence hasn’t needed to be repaired in awhile but the sea lions are starting to gather more around the lighthouse which can be an issue

Ecological

  • unfortunately still no elephant seals, they should be showing up any day now
  • the snow goose is still around
  • there are two entangles sea lions, it doesn’t look like the usual plastic packing tape but this time looks like fishing line, two of them have it tightly wrapped around their heads, I have notified marine rescue and will keep an eye on these sea lions and hopefully we can help them out

The Snow Goose

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Weather

  • Visibility: 0-15 Miles
  • Wind: 5-20 NE
  • Sky: Dense fog to partly cloudy
  • Water: Calm to choppy, under a metre

Boats/Visitors

  • A few ecotours and fishing boats going by
  • Guy and a new Pearson Staff member came by today, gave him a tour and filled up on diesel

Maintenance

  • ran the generator and the desalinator, now that we had a good rainfall the cistern is filling up, hopefully start pressure washing more soon

Ecological

  • unfortunately still no elephant seals, they should be showing up any day now
  • the sea lions are starting to gather around the lighthouse more, need to back them up a bit a few times throughout the day
  • the little snow goose is still around

Busy Week

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Weather

  • Visibility: 0-15 Miles
  • Wind: 0-15 NE
  • Sky: Partly cloudy
  • Water: Calm to choppy, under a metre

Boats/Visitors

  • the past week was CAS week at the college so I had two groups of students drop by, the first group were marine scientists that came for 5 days and helped out with cleaning up garbage, collecting driftwood, doing a daily census and stuff like that
  • the second group were divers that unfortunately did not get to dive while they were here but have been diving around race rocks before, they stayed for two nights

Maintenance

  • What a week, the fence had to be repaired quite a bit, the students helped me with it one day, and I did not properly show them how to repair the fence so the wire ended up being grounded which the sea lions took full advantage of and completely messed up the fence
  • The electric pump in the crane house is working but is kind of slow going, it also takes a lot of priming
  • the fire pump is out of commission at the moment, there were a lot fo issues with it probably due to the fact it is not a saltwater pump and has been sitting by the ocean for 3 years
  • the desalinator is not cooperating either, it will work for maybe an hour before it shuts itself off, I can restart it but again it will only run for another hour and only desalinates half the water it used to in the same amount of time

Ecological

  • I personally have seen about 8 humpback whales a day for the past week
  • there was also a pod of about 6 killerhwhales that one of the students saw from the lighthouse which we found out later were transients and were actually hunting sea lions
  • There have also been some interesting birds around, there was a robin here, which I don’t typically see and there was also a snow goose, which I personally have never seen here before, its been hanging out with the Canada geese other birds include oyster catchers, killdeer, ravens, and eagles
  • the neck banded sea lions seem to come and go, they are very difficult to keep track of, I believe there are two at the moment and I see them about once a week, since there are over 1000 sea lions at the moment they easily get lost in the crowd, even the group of students I had here only saw them once

Chen caerulescens : Snow Goose –Race Rocks Taxonomy

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Snow Goose

Lesser Snow Goose, Chen caerulescens

Domain Eukarya
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata
Subphylum Vertebrata
Class Aves
Order Anseriformes
Family Anatidae
Subfamily  Anserinae
Genus Chen
Species caerulescens
Common Name: Snow Goose or Blue Goose

 

This is the first observation and photo we have of a snow goose at  Race Rocks. Ecoguardian Courtney Edwards took this photo on April 21, 2014. These geese migrate in great numbers through the lower mainland area at this time of year.

Cackling goose and Snow goose

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Light Wind in the morning, String Westerly in the evening. Cloudy with scattered showers. Rain in the evening. Tour boats:8 1030 flyover by a small float plane The Cackling Goose and Snow Goose (note — a new record for Race Rocks ) are still foraging on the grass on Great Race. The Canada Geese often chase these two smaller geese. The Sea lions all moved to the East side of West Rocks this morning. Up until today, they had been on South Rocks since I got here in the middle of March. Eagles are regularly flying over Great Race and making all the Gulls take flight, but I have yet to see an Eagle grab a Gull.

-Ran the fire pump -Cleaned all the fire hose fittings -Fixed tank shed storage door latch -Worked on SOPs