Population 11

The NOAA ship "Oscar Elton Sette" or Sette for short, got here on Wednesday and dropped off Shawn, Mark, and Darren to monitor the Hawaiian monk seals, and Tammy and Kristen to monitor the green sea turtles. We also had some crew and visitors from the Sette come on island for a quick tour. People don't get to stay long, but everyone enjoys it. The monk seals are finally starting to have more pups, and there are some turtles finally nesting, so the new crews are keeping busy. The volunteers have been banding a lot of albatrosses the last 2 weeks and it looks like they are about 1/7 done. We're banding the ones that are closest to fledging first and waiting on the fluffy ones to make sure they are going to make it.

Our next group of volunteers are coming on the Kahana in a few weeks, so I've been keeping busy getting orders ready for the next 6 month of supplies. I'll quit going on and you can look at some pictures.

Here is the close up of the Sette (the Hi'ialakai that stopped by last week is the same type of ship). I cropped the picture because I took it from our small safeboat and it was too crooked.

I'm taking the second group of visitors back to the Sette. Our volunteer, Sarah, is on the port side (left) and the rest are visitors from the Sette.

The turtle camp is being set up on East Island, since that is where most of the turtles actually nest. They'll go out every night to count, measure, and identify the turtles.

This is an odd little Ornate butterflyfish that I saw last week. It looks almost normal from this side (it's tail (caudal fin) pattern is a little strange).

Here it is from the reverse side. It may have been injured when it was young to get that pattern, or it may just be genetically different from the normal ones. It's hard to get a close look at them.

Like I said before, the turtles are all over the place. Here is another one that swam up to investigate me. And I didn't crop this picture, it was just close. My underwater camera quit working today otherwise I would have put another picture of Caitie taking a picture, this time of a reef white-tip shark that was about 8 ft from her. Oh well, maybe next time.