Goodbye Colorado, Hello California

Winter is no more, at least for me - a rather odd thing for a Canadian to say in early February. The last snow to fall on my shoulders came last weekend when Jongmin and I were driving through Utah en route from Colorado to California. The snow quickly disappeared as we descended into Arizona, at around the same time that the conifers of the Rockies gave way to the palm trees of the southwest. Shortly thereafter we were in an even warmer California, our home for the next three months.

Our destination was not Catalina Island - rather, we made our way to Ventura, just north of LA, to attend the 7th California Island Symposium. The meeting took place from February 5th to the 7th and brought together folks who study pretty much anything on islands off the coast of California and Baja Mexico, from ecologists to geologists to archaeologists. There were representatives from universities across the United States and Mexico, numerous government agencies, and NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy and the Catalina Island Conservancy. Over 400 presentations shed light on ecosystems of the past and present, as well as management techniques and challenges specific to the region's many islands.

The sexy bird that it is, there were enough talks on orange-crowned warblers to fill much of the session on terrestrial birds, and yet another poster describing the project's work on Catalina Island:

Scott Sillett, "Annual survival of orange-crowned warblers breeding on Santa Catalina Island" (talk)

Helen Sofaer, "The effects of island scrub-jays on orange-crowned warbler reproductive behavior and nest success" (talk)

Jongmin Yoon, "Habitat modeling for orange-crowned warblers breeding on Santa Catalina Island" (talk)

Katie Langin, "To breed or not to breed? Demographic consequences of the driest winter on record for songbirds on Catalina and Santa Cruz Islands" (talk)

Hannah Montag, "Nest site selection in the Catalina Island orange-crowned warbler (Vermivora celata sordida)" (poster)

Hearing about research on the Channel Islands and seeing familiar faces has given us an extra spark of excitement as we head into the 2008 field season. On February 15th we will take the ferry from San Pedro to Catalina Island and commence our 5-month stint in the field. In the meantime, we are enjoying our final days of sleeping in past the crack of dawn.