I couldn't face returning to the bunk, and I was still too sick to look at seabirds, and so I stood for five hours and did little but imagine changing my return flight, which I'd booked for the following week to allow for delays, and going home early.
That is, until population ecologist Christophe Barbraud of the National Center for Scientific Research in Villiers en Bois, France, and his colleague Henri Weimerskirch of the University of Washington in Seattle took a look at seabirds, such as penguins and petrels, in eastern Antarctica.
Shetland has three national nature reserves, at the seabird colonies of Hermaness and Noss, and at Keen of Hamar to preserve the serpentine flora.
Their research combined NASA satellite imagery with on-the-ground observations at one seabird nesting site in northeast Greenland and four in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway.
Fungal strains were obtained from Ixodes uriae ticks (as part of a National Environment Research Council funded study of a tickborne virus) at a seabird breeding colony on Great Saltee Island, Ireland (52°07′N, 6°36′W).
This difference can be explained by differences in fox densities as a result of lower resource availability in the inland valley of Adventdalen compared with the high resource availability at large seabird cliffs in the Grumant area (5, 6 ).
Only C. dubliniensis was isolated from the Great Saltee ticks; however, we have detected other Candida spp. from both soil and tick samples (unpub. data) at other seabird colonies, which suggests that marine as well as terrestrial birds (9 ) carry a variety of yeast species (15 ).
SOS Puffin is a conservation project at the Scottish Seabird Centre at North Berwick to save the puffins on islands in the Firth of Forth.
When I write, I look out the window of my home office — at the harbor filling and emptying with the tide, and at the seabirds settling in to eat.
It bobbed and slopped across the Atlantic Ocean, past Newfoundland and Nova Scotia; it was snapped at by seabirds off the coast of Massachusetts, where a stream of cold water took it south into the Caribbean.
