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Introduction-

During the spring of 2005 a collaborative effort between U.S. Fish and Wildlife, College of the Atlantic, and Bar Harbor Whale Watching Company arranged to start a pelagic seabird census for the up coming summer. There has not been a pelagic study in almost 20 years along the east coast, and U. S. Fish and Wildlife thought that the pelagic data could be very significant and wanted to see if a survey could be taken from a whale watching boat. Linda Welch a wildlife biologist who works at U. S. Fish and Wildlife office in Milbridge, ME was the government affiliate that had a major part in the planning and requesting grant funds for the project. Scott Swann and Matt Drennon the ornithology teachers at COA sought to recruit a student from the school to participate in an internship who would be working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. A former COA graduate Zach Klyver has a position at the Bar Harbor Whale Watching Company as the head naturalist and received permission to have an intern collect data aboard one of the whale watching boats. These four people would be the advisors for the project to help teach and guide the student through the pelagic census. A biologist named Doug Forsell has a background in aerial surveying and helped write a manual describing the method for collecting the pelagic data. Doug came up with all of the necessary equipment to Bar Harbor and the group of advisors and the student intern Jonathan Busko, spent a day out on the Friendship exposing Jonathan to equipment and the methods for collecting data. The Friendship V is a high speed catamaran that makes daily trips from Bar Harbor to offshore areas including the Inner and Outer Schoodic ridges, and Mount Desert Rock. Jonathan started collecting data halfway into June and his schedule through the summer was two trips a day, four days a week and then a day transcribing data on land. As the summer was coming to an end, it seemed that the pelagic animals were a bit late this year so the U.S. Fish and Wildlife decided on continuing the data collection, to see if anything significant took place. Jonathan was attending school in the fall so his schedule decreased to one trip a day two days a week. But the data collection went from June 16 to October 19. It should be noted that the main attraction of the whale watching boat are whales, so this made it difficult to record data, because the boat would stop for potential and actual whale sightings. Also the weather was a main factor in collecting data, sometimes the boat would not leave the dock because of stormy conditions and other trips it made were so foggy you could not see 100 feet off the bow. Most of the data was collected on the trips back and forth to the whale areas, but certain counts at the whale sightings and transects out at the whale ground added some addition data recording.