Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Late Post

Sorry for the missed Sunday blog again, but the internet here has really been bad lately. I can only upload pictures late at night. Tonight we were out doing a mark/recapture study on wedge-tailed shearwaters and just got back in (it's 11:45 pm) so I was up. Normally this is past my bedtime. I think we only got around 150 of the birds caught tonight. So I think we'll have to go out at least one more late night to get the 600 birds we need.
Now that I have all of my volunteers here and my asst. mgr, I'm catching up on a lot of organizing and maintenance. It's nice to be able to be just a little bit behind, instead of way behind.
Everything is still beautiful out here. The green sea turtles are everywhere now and getting ready to start digging nests everywhere, and the seals are almost ready to start having their pups. The major bird nesting time is also starting for most of the species that are here, and the albatross chicks are getting their flight feathers in. I'll have to get you an updated albatross picture next week.
We had a good boat trip and saw some manta rays, no whales this time. So as usual, it was another great week (and a half).

Last week on our outer island trip, we saw a few manta rays. It's tough to get a good picture of them. This one was about 7 or 8 ft across.

We also saw a few spotted eagle rays surfacing near the boat house. Pardon my saying, but these are some goofy looking critters. This one is a female trying to get away from the 3 smaller males in the picture.

There are quite a few masked booby chicks hatching right now. They don't have feathers when they are born, so the parent will sit on them for a while.

This chick is almost to the age where the parent doesn't need to do this.

This masked booby has 5 eggs. I'm not sure they are all his eggs. It looks like the big one may be a frigatebird egg that it found. I'll keep an eye on this nest and see what happens.

Dasha and Ruth are fixing a band that was not closed all the way on this masked booby. If the bands aren't put on right they can catch on lines and branches and things. Notice the eye protection and leather gloves. These birds bite really hard.

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