Park Postcards Podcast | Episode 9 – Alcatraz Island
Transcript
Aranza Herrera: Hello friends, welcome to another podcast.
My name is Aranza Herrera and I'm the academic intern of the community outreach department.
Today I will be talking to Lidia D’Amico, Alcatraz, biologist of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
We will be talking about some of her day-to-day assignments and what we can do when we visit the park.
So, Lidia, tell us, what do you do in the park? What are some of your day-to-day jobs? Your projects?
Tell us about it.
Lidia D’Amico:
Yeah So, it's very interesting, a lot is usually going on, and I'm new to the position, I started back in September, during COVID and so that was an interesting and kind of challenging time and I'm still learning a lot on the job, but basically, my role on the island is to help manage the different seabird and waterbird colonies that exist on the island.
Not a lot of people know that Alcatraz is a big seabird, waterbird Rookery, where thousands of birds come every season to nest, it’s really a unique situation where you have hundreds of thousands of birds, just nesting on the island in close proximity to people.
Alcatraz during pre-COVID times usually has about 5000 visitors a day, with those conditions, we have to make sure that disturbance doesn't happen to the birds while they're nesting. We have to make sure that habitat is suitable for them and that they can continue coming back to the island to breed because it's important for their conservation.
We have an ongoing management and monitoring studies that we do seasonally where we count the number of nests, we look at reproductive health, we look at the number of chicks that are being fledged and we also monitor species diversity.
Over the years the populations fluctuate based on different variables and now we have climate change to consider with all of that on top of these bird colonies nesting in a highly dense urban area, you have issues related to climate change, now going to affect them. So, a lot of it is managing these colonies and providing educational outreach for visitors. Because when people come to Alcatraz, they think the prison, the Rock, they might have some romantic notion of it, but they don't realize that there's a lot of birds here that call the island home.
So, right now we have a lot of birds nesting and all the chicks have hatched and they're getting bigger and they're kind of just wandering all over the island. So, I also do a lot of bird rescues where I try to corral the birds away from public areas and that way there isn't any conflict, or people getting too close to them.
That's basically the position in a nutshell.
Aranza Herrera:
And what is the main project that you are now working on?
Lidia D’Amico:
On Alcatraz there are a lot of different projects and the main species that we monitor is the Brandt’s cormorant. They are the most numerous on the island. There's about 4000, probably over 4000 birds on the island right now. We have a monitoring program where we create subplots and just monitor the number of active nests within these plots and then throughout the season, we take data on the success of that nest, how many eggs did they lay, if all the eggs hatched and if all those chicks went to fledge. We have these different criteria of success or I guess that's the criteria of success for a nest, if the all the chicks survived and they left the nest and they're able to go out on their own. I do that monitoring work with our research partner Farallon Institute, they do the bulk of the field work, and I oversee their monitoring duties, but we do that kind of monitoring for about five to six different species of birds.
We also have Western gulls, pigeon guillemots, which are these little black sea birds with white wing bands. They nest on the island. We also have black crowned night herons, snowy egrets, great blue herons, and most recently we have a pair of Peregrine Falcons nesting on the island. Which is really cool.
I rotate through all those different species and monitor the nests and include that data into the long-term health of those populations and look at trends. We have data sets going back, to the early 90s on some of these populations. There's been instances where the numbers will dip down like the Brandt’s cormorants in 2009 just completely crashed. They didn't nest on the island at all and that was due because of warm water conditions that were happening offshore related to what's called the southern El Nino Southern Oscillation, where a warm current will pass like a warm blob off the coast of California, and so the fish, their prey item, Northern anchovy, which is part of the main diet, wasn't available to them because the ocean conditions weren't favorable for northern anchovy. So, in our data set we see a big dip and then they come back next year. That's one of the reasons why we have these long-term monitoring efforts to look at variability in the populations and try to see if we can associate it with a certain cause, if the population skyrocket, or if they dip, or if they're remaining stable.
Those are most of the projects that I'm doing.
Aranza Herrera:
What is the environmental message you want to give to people?
Lidia D’Amico:
Oh yeah, that's a good one.
There’re so many things, I guess ultimately, these animals, organisms, ecosystems, require protection and they shouldn't just be valued for aesthetic beauty or monetary gain.
These environments exist, not just for the enjoyment of humans, but as part of the greater ecosystem that we’re also a part of. I think just having that perspective shift that people shouldn't be on top like the apex and then everything else is below. It's more like we're integrated into this ecosystem as well. And if the environment starts to degrade and species start dying, you start to see an ecological collapse, that will affect us too.
Aranza Herrera:
Thank you, Lidia, for sharing with us about your job on Alcatraz and to encourage us to be more aware of the health of our planet and ultimately, that's why conservation is so important. It helps preserve the ecosystem and species, not just for aesthetic reasons, but because it helps us. It helps our planet stay healthy.
And thank you podcast friends for tuning in on today's episode.
We hope you'll join us again to learn more about our parks.
Music: “Swing city” (Free to use songs licensed by iMovie)
Aranza Herrera has been working with the Community Outreach team, as part of the Academic Internship Program. To make information about the parks accessible to the public, Aranza interviewed National Resources staff from different park sites this summer. Learning about GOGA's diverse ecosystems, the plants and animals that use these parks as their habitats, how the community can help wildlife stay healthy, and some of the staffs' day to day work and projects. Today she is in conversation with Lidia D'Amico.