Days 8 & 9: Thursday & Friday June 10th & 11th
On day 8 I was smacked with a terrible sinus infection (which I finally got rid of this week, three weeks later), so these two days were spent recuperating at Kanarymuit. Everyone else in camp, except for Tim and me left camp on the 10th to do spike camps and boat crews, so it was quiet these two days.
Day 10: Saturday June 12th
Plot 8, W 164.92644, N 61.17258
I finally managed to get out today! The weather was decent, and Tim and I were dropped onto two plots which were half-river. Because of this, we could each do a plot. Another straight forward plot, mostly white-fronts and cackling geese, but I personally had a few dunlin nests, and my first eider nest!
There was one large pool on this plot, spotted with a number of islands. The majority of the nests on these islands were cackler nests, but I came across an odd one on a peninsula. The hen was crouched on the nest, like in the picture above (which isn't mine) but half of here was under the plant material. From what I could see, she obviously wasn't a goose, but she was too large to be a dabbling duck. I couldn't see her beak, and my first thought was "ptarmigan?" But I took one step closer and saw her bill, and I noticed it was a spectacled eider hen! If I hadn't been knee deep in water, I would have pulled out my camera and taken a picture myself.When she did flush, she defecated on the nest. This is apparently common for eiders. It's pretty rank, full of fish guts and other invertebrates. Unfortunately, it got on my hands, and the smell stuck with me the rest of the day, as I noticed when I swiped my hand across my nose and got a whiff of eider poop.
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