Army Ornithological SocietyBlog Category | Ascension Island
Ascension Island 2015
For some great photos from this April's expedition to Ascension see Rich Mooney's photo set on Flickr.
CommentsAscension Frigatebird
AOS Expedition discovers first recorded nesting Frigatebirds since Charles Darwin
On Saturday 1 December a member of the AOS discoverd two nesting Ascension Frigatebirds on a remote part of the Island. The AOS were on their 18th expedition to monitor seabirds on the Island. This find spread like wildfire across the Island as this was the first recorded nesting Frigatebirds on the mainland since Charles Darwin visited in the early 19th Century. A press release was prepared by the Ascension Island Government with the RSPB and was printed in the Observer today. Unfortunately the role of the AOS in providing the data for conservation efforts and this momentus find was not mentioned by the paper.
CommentsSooty Tern Population Size
The latest Ascension research paper, Estimate of Sooty Tern Onychoprion fuscatus population size following cat eradication on Ascension Island, central Atlantic, has been published in the Bulletin of the African Bird Club. 19: 166–171.
CommentsAdopt a Sooty Tern
Get involved in the twists and ‘terns’ of seabird migration on Ascension.
Dr Jim Reynolds, School of Biosciences University of Birmingham, in conjunction with the AOS, is launching an ‘Adopt a Sooty Tern’ Scheme.
The aim is to obtain movement data from a sufficient number of Sooty Terns that will allow us to determine, with confidence, the locations in the Atlantic Ocean that are most important to the species between breeding seasons.
An expedition returns to Ascension in late November in the hope of recovering the remaining 17 geolocators fitted to birds in March 2011. Data will be recoverable from these devices but we want to deploy many more devices to continue this study.
If you would like to adopt a Sooty Tern by purchasing a geolocator to help continue this research then for full details please download the information sheet.
In return for your geolocator purchase you will be provided with:
- details of when and where the bird was caught
- a photograph of the bird with the geolocator deployed on its leg
- the ring number of the bird
- an opportunity to name the bird
- details of geolocator recovery efforts on two subsequent AOS expeditions to the island
- when and where the geolocator was recovered
- a jpeg image of the migration path of the bird as visualised in Google Earth
- the actual geolocator that has been carried across the South Atlantic by ‘your’ migrating bird
If you can't spoil yourself then why not adopt a Sooty Tern as a gift or club together with friends and/or colleagues to do so.
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