It's finally warm here

It's been pretty cool and windy here for the last couple of months. We're finally getting the warm breezes instead of the cool wind from the north Pacific. Cool is relative by the way. Cool for me means I sleep with a blanket, but I still wear shorts and short sleeves everyday. The volunteers all wear sweatshirts and long pants.

We finished our wedge-tailed shearwater mark recapture for the year. We caught and banded or read bands on over 600 birds. That's one of the ones that we do at night so although it's nice to see the stars, we are so busy crawling under the buildings and bushes that we don't get to look up until we walk back to the barracks. I think I mentioned before that the nearest lights are almost 500 miles away, so we get a pretty good view of the stars.

Another project we did last week was move big pieces of coral that are all over the island to the seawall. A lot of birds fall down between our double seawall and will die if we don't do our walk every morning and find them. By filling the space with coral, at least the birds can walk or fly out on their own. So hopefully, we'll have a lot fewer stuck or dead birds on that corner of the island.

Northwest corner of Tern Island seawall before filling with coral rocks.

Northwest corner of Tern Island after filling with coral rocks.

Here's a Potter's angelfish. They are pretty common and we see them alot while snorkeling.

We are starting to get a little island forming off of the SE side of Tern. It probably won't last too long and it gets covered up by high tide.

Just another shot of the sooty terns on Tern Island.

Friday night at the boat dock with a 30 second exposure. I hope this didn't get too pixelated when I shrunk it down to webpage size.