If you have been to an in-person COASST training, then you have seen our (slightly smelly) teaching collection of dead bird parts. These bio-artifacts help train our volunteers on how to properly take wing, foot, and bill measurements before going out on surveys. We bring parts of the birds (feet, heads, wings) because they take up much less space in a suitcase than full birds!
The teaching collection helps with measurement taking but it also showcases the wide variety of birds COASSTers might encounter and allows us to show off some of the cool adaptations those birds have (like how gulls have swollen heels to help stay comfortable while standing for long periods of time).
We get the cool things in our teaching collection in a variety of ways and we do it carefully. COASST has a special permit that allows us to hold endangered, threatened and migratory bird species for teaching purposes and we report anything new we collect every year. Over time, staff have collected birds found during field trips from our office, or we have received long-frozen birds from agency partners who used those carcasses for other science purposes. But sometimes, teaching specimens have more adventurous stories!
In November, we received a phone call from COASSTer Marinell in Coos Bay, OR who had found something pretty rare on her survey that day – a beached Cocos Booby!
Cocos Boobys (Sula Brewsteri) typically like warmer locations, but have been expanding their range into areas where COASST operates as environmental change occurs. Occasional sightings have now been documented as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and even inland like this one on the Willamette River in Portland, OR! These birds are in the same family as the more well-known Blue-footed Booby. They have a similarly shaped bill, but don’t sport the blue feet, instead having light yellow webbed feet. Cocos boobys are still rarely found where COASST operates, but we are interested to see how populations change over time. Data collected on the beach makes that possible!
This bird isn’t in our field guide (though it might be added in a future edition), so using that to get to species isn’t going to work. Having an example of this bird in our teaching collection will help train new COASSTers to realize what they might have found.
Marinell knew she found something special and wanted to know if we could use the carcass for our teaching collection. Obviously we wanted to say yes, but she was in Oregon, and our office is in Northern Washington, and we weren’t sure if collection and transport was allowed for non-staff members under our permit. Major kudos to Marinell who went the extra mile to call her local U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office to figure out what she was allowed to do as a member of the general public. This started a chain of phone calls between COASST staff, agency permit staff, Marinell, and eventually several family members of COASST staffers who live along the I-5 corridor. In short order, we were able to add Marinell as a temporary sub-permittee to COASST’s migratory bird permit, allowing her to hold and transport the Coco’s Booby, for the purpose of contributing to our teaching collection. Rather than taking the Pacific Flyway, this booby rode up I-5 North to Portland in a cozy cooler in the back of Marinell’s car. Once there, it was handed off to our own Participant Coordinator’s mother (thanks mom!), who graciously stored the carcass in her garage freezer until we could come retrieve it.
Now, we are happy to have this booby safely in our freezer as part of the COASST teaching collection!