by Mathew Zappa, of Carleton College
One of the sections of the trip that I had been most excited for was the bird surveys. I was looking forward to start collecting data for my study, but also had personal reasons to be excited. On the drive up, one of the questions that came up was “What would be your perfect day?” I answered that a full day of birding would probably be pretty close to my perfect day, and I would get a chance to experience that on this trip.
We visited a few lakes the afternoon we arrived, but besides a family of Whooper Swans, we didn’t see a lot of birds. We planned to start the main surveys the next day. We got a bit of a late start, and had a long drive to get to our survey sites. As we pulled up to the second lake, a couple flocks of Bar-Headed Geese were swimming along the shore. I was excited to see them, since they are one of my study species and we hadn’t seen any so far. As I was counting the birds, I noticed that one of the geese had a neck collar. Numbered collars are a method of marking birds, usually larger waterfowl, to study migration and movement patterns. The markings were faded, but I was able to eventually read the code on the collar, and we plan to find contact information to report the observation when we have internet access.
After lunch, we drove to Tsaagan Nuur, which is the largest lake in the Darhad valley. It took us over 3 hours to survey the lake, stopping along the shore to scan for birds. It was getting late by the time we finished, and we still had to drive back to the camp. Everyone was pretty tired when we got back, and after dinner, we went to bed early.
The next day, we decided to split the group in order to cover more lakes. Most of the students went in one car to spend time practicing identification and work on academics, and I went in the other car to survey lakes farther away. We had some trouble accessing the first lakes that we had planned, due to higher water levels. We crossed paths with the other group and decided on the lakes we would survey the rest of the day. Before we separated, we stopped to observe a Steppe Eagle nest for a few minutes. After a 2-hour drive, we arrived at the beginning of the chain of lakes. As we progressed, we noted several families of swans, as well as Demoiselle Cranes and many species of ducks.
The lakes in this area tended to be larger, with less aquatic plants. The larger lakes had larger flocks of birds, including one lake with 87 swans! One of the last lakes we surveyed had a breeding colony of Mongolian Gulls, which I was excited to find. This colony was located during the surveys last year, and I was hoping we would find it again this year. After we surveyed the colony, we only had a couple more lakes to visit before we had finished the surveys. By the time we got back, it was quite late, but we were happy to be done, and we were able to return to base camp a day early.