The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Grant for Seabird Monitoring and Management on Maine’s Coastal Islands

Work under this proposed grant, to be preformed on Eastern Brothers Island, Jonesport, ME; Petit Manan Island, Steuben, ME; Ship Island, Tremont, ME; and Metinic, Matinicus Isle, ME will include the following:

Cooperator will provide staff (paid or volunteer) sufficient to conduct monitoring and management studies during the field season on these four islands. The USFWS refuge staff will provide island staff and volunteers with protocols for research projects, bird monitoring, social attraction, predator control, visitor contact, misc. data recording (weather, significant events, daily journals), and end of season reporting. Work will be done and records kept according to these protocols.

Cooperator will communicate weekly throughout the field season to coordinate, share information, and assess progress towards the agreed-upon objectives.

Cooperator will provide the Service two copies of a detailed final report outlining each season’s results, no later than December 20, that will include a summary of gull control efforts, nesting seabird population numbers, nesting seabird productivity, seabird prey species, incidental bird sightings, other breeding phenology observations gathered on these refuge-owned islands, methods employed in the collection of these data, numbers of public visitors, names and total number of work hours for those researchers/volunteers participating in the study, copies of digital photographs they have taken with the rights to use for refuge purposes if photographer is credited, and any miscellaneous information pertaining to important events which took place during the field season.

Cooperator will provide copies of biological data, including banding schedules, incidental bird sightings, and phenological observations, and tern and laughing gull grid square/area nesting densities.

Cooperator will prepare an oral presentation of the field season’s results and present it at the annual summer Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group meeting to facilitate exchange of information state-wide, regarding recovery efforts.

Cooperator will provide the Service with records of all birds banded each season in the form of banding schedules.

All data collected will become the joint ownership of the cooperator and the Service; disks of the raw monitoring data in a standardized format to be incorporated in the USFWS GIS biological resource database will be submitted to the Service Project Officer in a standardized format before December 20, 2013. These data will be used to generate base maps for all islands within the Refuge; NAS will be given full credit for the use of these data.