Melinda Fowler at San Nicholas Island, CA--It's elephant seal madness at Ano Nuevo, but a small subset of the UCSC TOPP researchers left the craziness to retreat to the island paradise of San Nicolas Island.  Our goal while soaking up the island's sun is to recapture the 10 sea lions that we deployed satellite and GPS tags on in November.  San Nicolas is a beautiful island, and we had some sunny days, but our work is not a vacation.  We scan for the VHF frequencies everyday, hoping to catch one of the sea lions home from her foraging trip.

When we hear the VHF signal of a female, we must then find her.  This involves hiking all over the dunes and crawling and searching for her with our binoculars.  The tasks requires lots and lots of patience.  When we find her, we must stealthily creep up to her with our nets and capture her.  Unfortunately, the terrain we must crawl over is not terribly fragrant or comfortable.  Not to mention sea lions have habits of lying on rocks very near the large crashing waves.  Each approach can take hours.  California sea lions are very aware and spook easily, so we must be very, very quiet in order to get close enough to capture one.  After we capture her, we remove her tags and take a blood and milk sample and she is on her way, sans electronics.

We have recovered 3 tags so far.  Our greatest success has been capturing a female that has been making very long trips to the Coronado Islands off of Baja.  We were happy she happened to be on land during our recapture trip.