Images

A banded Field Sparrow that was found as part of a bird collision survey at Prudential Tower in Newark, New Jersey in 2020.

A Black-throated Blue Warbler at a stopover site along the Patuxent River.  Photo courtesy of Michael Lutmerding of the EESC at Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, MD.

Golden-winged Warbler at a stopover site during fall migration                 

Atlantic Menhaden feeding in the Chesapeake Bay in Chesapeake Beach, MD, USA.. Photo by Mikey Lutmering.

A pair of box turtles encountered during a survey at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, MD

Andy Royle processing a box turtle.

Category: Ecosystems, Field Work, Herps, Research

Eastern Box Turtle in Inwood, WV. Eastern Box Turtles are common in this region, but are threatened or listed as species of special concern in some New England states.

Blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) are an important aquatic invasive species throughout many Chesapeake Bay tributaries.  Scientists from the EESC are working with federal, state, and regional partners to assess the potential impacts of blue catfish on native fauna and important fisheries resources throughout the region.

Field staff are establishing a permanent transect to measure changes in trail conditions along this trail.  A self-leveling laser was used to set up the transect and the diagram illustrates how vertical measurements are collected to compute cross-sectional area soil loss measures.  

Boulder Field of Hickory Run State Park in Pennsylvania, taken in 2020 by Andrea Ostroff.        

As part of a fish health assessment, Heather Walsh is performing a necropsy on a young of the year smallmouth bass from the Susquehanna River.  Previously, young of the year smallmouth bass from the Susquehanna River drainage experienced fish kills and lesions.  This work was conducted to follow-up on the health status of these bass populations.

This is Drew Kellogg, a 2019 USGS summer hire filtering water in Rock Creek Park for eDNA analyses. The eDNA will be screened for the presence of aquatic invertebrates. 

Brendan Crossman measures porewater salinity in a vegetation plot situated on a survey transect from the wetland into the adjacent upland forest.

Numerical values and colors represent the total frequency of observer passes through the center of each grid cell during the 60 d of survey activity (1–4 surveyors each survey day) by USGS EESC in 2020. For example, a value of 40 would mean that a given grid cell was searched 40 times during the season.

Dr.s Densmore and Henderson conducting a health assessment on a northern snakehead fish. This fish species is an air breather so health assessments out of water are not impossible to perform. 

A silver-phase American Eel in a northeastern river begins migrating downstream to the ocean to spawn in the Sargasso Sea. The migration can span hundreds of kilometers in freshwater rivers and thousands of kilometers at sea.

Radio-tagged silver phase American Eels being released for a CAFRL telemetry study of downstream passage of eels at hydroelectric dams on the Shetucket River, Connecticut.

Prototype design of an airlift developed at CAFL to transport downstream migrant eels through a bypass pipe and away from turbine intakes. The airlift design passes eels as well as a conventional siphon or gravity pipe.

This is the banding station used by BBL for years before the recent upgrades. 

Dr. Christine Densmore, DVM uses an ultrasound on fish as part of a health assessment.

Apparatus used to test the sensitivity of eels to low-voltage pulsed DC electric fields. Knowledge of sensitivity of eels to electric fields enables development of behavioral barriers that use electricity to guide eels away from turbine intakes.