Tern Island Times

Midway Blog

2011-01-02T21:17:00.002-10:00

OK, I'm back on Midway. So if you want to see what I'm up to on Midway check out:

http://peteatmidway.blogspot.com

and if you want to see the latest things going on at Tern, check out Paula's blog at:

http://ffs2011.blogspot.com

Thanks everyone for reading and being interested in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

News

2010-11-11T13:47:00.006-10:00

I had a great vacation and now it's back to work. However, I won't be going back to Tern Island. I officially got the job at Midway so I'll be going there on Thursday. I'll probably start up my old Midway blog- peteatmidway.blogspot.com. I'll see if I have enough storage space to keep it going. I'll be sorry to leave Tern, but I love Midway too, and the promotion isn't bad either. There was some news on the island. Ty got his flipper bit off by a large tiger shark while he was out snorkeling one day. He's fine and got back to shore without a scratch, but they are staying out of the water for now. Less than 2 weeks later, a person working at Palmyra (another atoll that USFWS manages along with the Nature Conservancy), got bit in the head by a 6 ft gray reef shark. He's a bit scratched up but is ok too. I still won't worry about going in the water, but I'll be paying attention. I'm posting a picture of Ty with his fins, but not anything else this time. I'll probably do one last wrap up post on this blog from Midway. If you are all hooked on the Tern Island happenings, Paula, who will be the new acting manager now that I'm gone, has started a new blog at ffs2011.blogspot.com. She does a little more writing than I do, and I'll read it to see what's going on there. See you from Midway!

Last Day

2010-09-20T21:44:00.006-10:00

Better late than never, right? I've been really busy getting ready to leave and going over a lot of details so Ty and Paula don't have to learn everything the hard way. At the moment, I'm scheduled to be on leave/at training/working in Honolulu until March. But things rarely work out according to plan around here, so I'm not quite sure what the schedule will be. I'll put some updates up when I figure things out. I really could just pretend I'm still on Tern and keep posting new pictures for the next 120 years (that's figuring with the over 60,000 pictures I've taken here and posting 9 or 10 pictures a week). Or maybe I'll just take my vacation.

My last week here was a lot like the others. Pulling weeds, counting birds, finding turtle hatchlings to save, snorkeling and picking up marine debris, fixing tractors, boats, and generators, and all that usual stuff. Maybe they'll let me pull weeds and fix something at my apartment complex in D.C.? And I'm sure there will be no shortage of marine debris on the Potomac, I'm also pretty sure that I won't have any snorkel pics to show you.
OK, see you soon!

I hope you aren't getting tired of pictures of yellow tangs in the coral.

Here's a Hawaiian green lionfish in the coral. I haven't seen any of these for 2 years, now I've seen 2 in the last 2 days.

A runway puddle at sunrise. I hope to not see this tomorrow. That would mean we take our brooms out to spread the water out so it dries before the plane gets here.

A couple of white terns appear to be pondering the mop??

I haven't shown you a red-footed booby on a bike for a long time. So here's another one.

We're banding Bulwer's petrels right now. This old chick has a good spot in the coral by the seawall. It should be leaving any day now.

I had my office in a computer room with no windows for almost 2 years. A few months ago, I decided to move my computer across the hall. Now I have a window with this view.

Good Week

2010-09-12T20:47:00.003-10:00

It turns out we did get our Labor day off after all, oh and Happy Grandparents Day (9/12). The Hi'ialakai showed up a little too late to offload Monday afternoon, so we did it Tuesday morning. It was a pretty productive week with Ty and Paula both here to help. We fixed the safeboat, changed out our photovoltaic system batteries, rescued a lot of turtles, banded a lot of birds, replanted some native plants, and best of all, got a lot of paperwork done! Alright, that last one wasn't that fun, but it needs doing.

It's been raining a lot here at night lately. It's nice for our drinking water but it's also nice for the invasive plants. They are starting to sprout like weeds! I may even lift the shower and toilet flushing restrictions.

I'll post next Sunday, but then I'll be off for a while. I'll tell you what I know next week.

As far as a textbook fish picture goes, this one may leave something to be desired, but the colors on this Christmas wrasse were amazing.

Here's Paula getting ready with the lines for tying up to the Hi'ialakai.

Another lost turtle on the runway picture (and the first dark clouds in a while).

This fish is a rainbow runner (about 2 ft long). We don't see them around too often, but they are out near LaPerouse sometimes.

Here's a giant trevally checking me out.

Here it is again with a friend.

This Christmas shearwater chick was recently banded. It's just got a bit of down left on the back of its head and neck.

Many of our shorebirds are returning from their breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada. This is a wandering tattler over in the old Coast Guard dump area.

Another white tern picture to finish off the blog.

Replacement

2010-09-05T21:08:00.005-10:00

Happy Labor Day. I hope your weekend is as good as mine. Not that I did anything too special so far, but it's always a great weekend on Tern Island. We're expecting the NOAA ship Hi'ialakai to bring us some food and supplies tomorrow, so we won't get the holiday off, but it's worth it to get fresh food.

We said goodbye to Mark, Tiphanie, and Carlos this week, so now we'll have to check up on the seal pups ourselves. There are still a couple that are nursing, so they need some looking in on. Ty and Paula came in on the plane also. Ty will be filling in for me while I'm off island through Dec. I've still got a couple more blogs to go before I'm off though.

As I said, it's been the usual around here. Collecting turtle hatchlings, picking weeds, picking up nets and ropes that wash up, counting birds, and of course the most fun part, cleaning and maintenance.

Our boat was out of commission for a bit because the thermostat went bad. The parts came on the plane so I was able to get that going again. Just to make sure it's ready for unloading the ship tomorrow, we had to take it over to Serendipity today (see last weeks post if you don't know what that is). It seems like it will work tomorrow.

This weaned pup is having a tough weekend. At least his mother taught him some manners. He covers his mouth when he yawns.

I was grading the runway before the plane came in (dragging a big I-beam) and just felt like taking a snapshot.

Some of the nice coral at Serendipity.

These are oval butterflyfish. They are a bit small in this picture, but I didn't want to crop one out for a closer view.

This is a young teardrop butterflyfish. We don't see them too often, but they are around.

A spectacled parrotfish. These parrotfish start out as females when they are young and turn into males as they mature. This one looks like it's in the process of changing since it has the color patterns of both.

More yellow tangs and a few other fish.

This is one of the green sea turtle hatchlings I found last week while doing my entrapment walk around the island. It would have been roasted by the sun in a few more hours, so at least I gave it a chance by putting it in the water.

We don't like this bird around here. It is a cattle egret and it can be a predator of small chicks and eggs. We don't mind vagrant predators that get here on their own normally, but this is an introduced bird to Hawaii and would not be a vagrant here otherwise. One bird won't do too much damage, but we don't want two to show up and start breeding. This picture is out on the back deck near the clothesline in case you were wondering why it's so cluttered.

I'm wondering if this masked booby was singing the Rolling Stones to itself "I'm not waiting on a lady, I'm just waitin on a friend" (they normally hang out in groups on the runway). At least that's what popped into my head when I saw it.

I like this picture of a juvenile red-footed booby because each feather is really distinct. I didn't shrink this one as much as most of the others so you might be able to see that better if you double click on it.

This juvenile red-footed booby is flaring its tail for airbrakes so it can see what I'm up to.

A white tern caught a couple of fish, either to impress another adult or to feed its chick.

Serendipity

2010-08-29T22:35:00.004-10:00

This week was another usual week. We found a lot of little turtle hatchlings wandering around the island and had to release them on the beach. We checked and counted some eggs and chicks. We cleaned the barracks on Thursday, like every Thursday (not quite as fun as the other things). And we topped it off with a nice Sunday snorkel today. You get a really short narrative today, but a good number of pics.

6 turtle hatchlings are patiently waiting in the bucket for sunset so they can get on with their lives.

This was a nice turtle release party in the rain. We had somewhere around 45 of them to let go this time.

Here's a row of masked boobies on the log on East Island.

A turtle caused some problems with these Bulwer's petrel nest boxes. The turtle buried the entrances. These 3 chicks were still alive, so it couldn't have been too long. We uncovered the entrances and I hope the parents come back to check on them.

There used to be two sand islands right near here, Whale and Skate Islands, which merged into one big island called Whale-Skate Island and then it washed away, never to be seen again. This area is surrounded by shallow reef in every direction so it's almost always calm. We call this snorkeling spot Serendipity. Pretty nice, huh?

We still have to pick up trash there though. Here's Sarah pulling out a rope with buoys that was stuck on some coral.

All of these pictures were from there today. This monk seal was probably wondering what we were doing in its spot.

It swam around us for a couple of minutes before it decided to move on. The fish are called Nenue in Hawaiian (chubs).

The yellow tangs always add some nice color to the pictures.

The bluefin trevallies follow us around pretty much every time we go snorkeling anywhere. They are waiting to see if we're going to scare out some dinner for them.

Just another jack.

I've been having trouble getting a picture of a sailfin tang. This one isn't too bad (and of course the yellow tang for some more color).

This is a pretty representative shot of how the coral looks over there.

Turtles and Seals

2010-08-22T22:32:00.006-10:00

It was a busy week with 2 NOAA ships here. The Oscar Elton Sette came to pick up Shawn and Darren since the seal monitoring season is pretty much done. Mark stayed back and will monitor them for a couple more weeks. The Hi'ialakai was also here doing some reef surveys and various underwater things. Pablo also hitched a ride with the Hi'ialakai so it's just Sarah, Phillip, and Keith for my volunteers now. Tiphanie and Carlos are still working with the sharks.

We've been doing the usual work around here- saving turtle hatchlings that don't crawl toward the water, pulling weeds, counting/banding birds, picking up marine debris, and that sort of thing.

I'm getting ready to take my vacation. Even though I enjoy it out here, after 10 months out here, it will be a nice break. I am really lucky for being able to live out here, but with living in my office and pretty much being able to only get 1000 yards away, I'd like to get back to the traffic, politics, high gas prices, the general rat race, etc. to recharge my batteries. I'm leaving in about a month and Ty will be out here for a while watching the place. I hope he doesn't get evacuated again. That was a bit of trouble, with the C-130 picking everyone up and him having to burn a couple of freezers full of rotten food and all.

I've got extra pictures this week, just because the newly weaned seal pups were playing on the beach right outside the barracks window. I couldn't decide which pics to use so I'm just putting up a bunch.

Pablo waving goodbye to Tern Island.

Keith, Phillip, and Sarah are digging up a turtle nest on East Island. We had to get a data logger (monitors nest conditions) that was put into the egg chamber when the turtle laid the eggs.

I found this turtle on the runway during my morning walk and set it on the beach. It was pretty lively and crawled right in.

This was the second turtle hatchling I found which was wandering in the weeds. It's amazing these tiny little twerps make it out there.

Here's a least tern that's visiting the island. There was another one, but it died over a week ago. We'll send it off for necropsy to find out what happened.

Here's the newly weaned pups by the barracks. They are only a couple months old. They don't play very long before they need a nap. I wish the sun was behind me for better lighting. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers.

Another Beautiful Week

2010-08-15T20:57:00.003-10:00

I try not to title my blog entries "Another Beautiful Week" every time, even though it is, but it works when I don't feel creative enough to think of something better.
We're losing a few more people this coming week. The monk seal crew is about done with their seal monitoring this summer. Shawn and Darren are going to be leaving as well as Pablo. That will bring us down to 7 people. The bird work is slowing down a bit since the last of the albatrosses are now gone from the island and most of the summer nesting for the other species is dwindling too. The only birds that are early in their season are the wedge-tailed shearwaters and that will keep us busy when those 700 or so chicks need banding.
The wind is finally starting to drop a little bit. It's been 15-20 mph for most of the summer. It keeps it a little cooler, but the chicks in the bushes have a harder time staying in their nests and get blown out fairly frequently. If we can find the nest, we will put them back, but that's not as easy as it sounds. If they get put in the wrong nest, they'll get pushed out and if they stay on the ground, they'll die, but we try.

One of the last remaining Laysan Albatross chicks. This one had a pretty good hairdo (I know it's not really hair!) As of today, there aren't any left on the island.

Here's a white tern chick up on the roof of the barracks.

An adult white tern on the basketball hoop at the boathouse.

This is an elegant coris and a goatfish under some coral.

A bluestriped and a threadfin butterflyfish swam by during my last snorkel.

World Heritage Site

2010-08-08T21:16:00.005-10:00

I didn't tell you the news last weekend. Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is a mixed cultural and natural site due to the cultural significance to the native Hawaiians and to the amazing and unique natural aspects of the monument. If you want to read more about World Heritage Sites, here is the link http://whc.unesco.org/ It won't change what we do here but at least it is recognized as "having outstanding universal value" by the World Heritage Committee.

The NOAA ship Oscar Elton Sette stopped by again. It dropped off a few things for the seal crew and the shark crew and brought some food, mail, and supplies for the volunteers and me. Dasha (my wife and a wonderful volunteer) left on the Sette so she can get to work at her real job and use that Ph.D. that she got in Pharmacology. She'll be working in Washington D.C. so all of you from there, make sure to say "Hi" when you see her.

Earlier today we took a swim off the end of the island. This is Keith, Tiphanie, Mark, and Pablo jumping in.

Here was almost all of the Tern population (Carlos and Tiphanie were on Trig Island) on Friday. From L to R, Keith, Pete, Pablo, Dasha, Shawn, Sarah, Mark, Phillip, and Darren.

Sarah and Phillip are squaring away the marine debris that we picked up off of East Island on Saturday. The seal crew had to save a turtle last week from some of the wires that are all over the island from Coast Guard and Navy days. So it was a good time to go get a bunch of wire as well as a few nets and ropes that had washed up.

East Island looks really barren right now. The turtles have dug up most of the weeds. The seeds will sprout sometime soon though.

This seal is one that we call "Channel Sleeper" because he's always out sleeping in the channel behind Tern. Every now and then he comes over to see what we're doing while snorkeling. He is 21 years old, which is getting up there for monk seals, but he should have 5 or 6 good years left in him.

Here he is again, I just liked the silhouette.

Here's another random fish picture. This is an arc-eye hawkfish. They always sit in the coral like this. I just noticed that I didn't put up any birds pics this week. Don't worry, you'll get some more soon.

Great week, as usual.

2010-08-01T16:07:00.006-10:00

Guess what? It was another beautiful week here at French Frigate Shoals.

Things are going along as usual. We are mostly doing bird plot work, weeding, and taking care of little maintenance projects. We did get quite a bit of marine debris picked up this week. We collected one net that we found out on the reef and the volunteers spent an afternoon digging and cutting rope that was stuck in the sand on Tern Island. At least no curious seals will get stuck in those.

There are still a few albatross chicks left on the island, but not many. We've got quite a few other species of chicks still here. We just started banding the Christmas shearwater chicks this week. I'll get some more pics of the volunteers banding one of these days.

This is Keith snorkeling above a school of little fish.

This is one of the Laysan albatross chicks getting ready to leave.

Pablo is releasing a green sea turtle hatchling that couldn't find the beach.

Here's a few old turtles and one seal pup (on the left) on East beach.

The seals like to sleep in the turtle pits sometimes.

Just in case you forgot what the buildings look like here. This is our fuel shed, warehouse, and the barracks is way in the back.

Another week off

2010-07-25T21:44:00.004-10:00

Sorry about missing last week too. Internet problems again!!! But I'd rather be here and have internet problems than a lot of other places!

Things are going along relatively smoothly here. Almost all of our albatrosses have gone. There's only a few late ones still around. We're still doing a bit of bird banding with red-footed and masked boobies, black noddies, and red-tailed tropicbirds. But we aren't getting too many new eggs so most of the seabird nesting is slowing down. The wedge-tailed shearwaters and Bulwer's petrels are the only ones that are just getting going.

The turtle nests have begun hatching. So far we've only found one hatchling that was alive. We put it in a coffee can with sand and kept it in the dark until after sunset. We released it and it swam off. At least it has a chance now instead of being stuck up in the weeds and drying out in the sun like the other few that we found so far. I'll get some pics of them when a few more of the nests start hatching. Everybody loves baby turtles.

The weather has been pretty good lately, so we've been out in the boat a few times also. We did some trash pickup on Gin island and swam with some manta rays on the way there. See, it's not so bad here even with slow internet service.

This manta was about 8 ft. across. The water was kind of cloudy, but that's why the rays like it. Lots of food to filter out of the water.

Some brown noddies are staking a claim to some of the debris on Gin Island. We took a boat load of it, but they still have plenty of debris left to sit on.

This is Disappearing Island. It is at the other end of the atoll. At least it was still there this time. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not, but the water is always beautiful.

Dasha made some great donuts last week.

This is a Christmas wrasse at LaPerouse Pinnacle. They are hard to get pictures of as evidenced by my next picture.

This is what a lot of my Christmas wrasse pictures look like. They like to be in the surge zone so I get a lot of bubble pictures.

We had to catch this turtle and carry her back to the beach. She got through our fences somehow and was crawling around on the runway. We didn't want her to get too scraped up, and didn't want her getting stuck somewhere, so 4 people scooped her up in the net and we let her go on Shell beach.

This is a trumpet fish. Sometimes they are brownish and striped, and sometimes they are bright yellow. I don't know why this one was upside down?

2 More People

2010-07-07T21:57:00.007-10:00

Sorry about the skipped week. As usual, the internet wasn't doing so well for a bit. It seems to be doing ok for now.
The Kahana came back again last week. It brought 2 more people to Tern. That gives us 11 people now. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) which is in charge of the Hawaiian monk seal program, hired 2 people to try to help with the shark problem we have out here. So far this year, 3 pups have been bitten by sharks, so a permit was issued to allow them to remove the sharks that are attacking the pups. They will only be targeting the sharks that specifically are going after the pups at Trig Island. Normally, we would say that it's just part of nature that some animals eat other animals, however, since the monk seals are endangered and numbers are still dropping, we've got to do everything we can to minimize the loss of the pups. It seems that there are only a couple of sharks that are doing the damage and if we can take care of them, then it will hopefully save a lot of pups. We also had three Hawaiian cultural practitioners (locals who have learned the traditional Hawaiian practices) come out to perform a ceremony for the taking of the sharks. It was nice to have them out here and it was great to have the cultural interaction and see the thoughtfulness that traditionally went into activities like fishing or visiting another island.
Our albatross banding is about done. We are still finding one or two that somehow hid from us, but overall, the volunteers did a great job. There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,200 birds banded this season.
See you next week, if the internet works!

I finally got my underwater camera back from Best Buy. Just in time to get this picture of Pablo with a big Ulua (giant trevally).

Those 2 orange specks in the boat are Carlos and Tiphanie.

Here are the seal and shark crew with the Hawaiian cultural practitioners performing a ceremony for the taking of the sharks that are killing the monk seal pups.

This Laysan albatross chick is testing out the wind.

So far we've only had one sooty tern chick fledge. This one won't be ready for a few more weeks.

We went to East Island one morning and got a little bit of rain. Most of the albatross chicks have fledged from there already.

The adult albatross feathers get worn out toward the end of the chick feeding season, so they start to get a little mottled and the white near their bill starts to expand.

The Christmas shearwater chicks are getting bigger. They won't be ready to band for a few more weeks though.

More Albatross Banding

2010-06-27T15:59:00.004-10:00

We got another seven hundred plus albatrosses banded this week. It's still our main job, although the masked boobies are needing bands too. We only have about 10 of those ready for banding at the moment and we only have just over 100 of them to do, so that's a bit easier to keep up with. We're getting settled into a routine for the most part, with a turtle to rescue here and there, but birds (and of course cleaning) are taking the majority of the time right now.
The turtles are still digging up all of the sand on the island for their nests and the seals are still having pups. So business as usual for those guys.
The new volunteers are spending most of their off time taking pictures or swimming/snorkeling. I think they all like it here so far. I can't think of a whole lot more to say this week so I'll just give you some pictures.

This black-footed albatross is freshly banded and is almost ready to fledge.

Since we're doing so much banding these days, here's another picture. Although Ruth just left, Keith will be here for a few more months.

A green sea turtle, great frigatebird, and a couple of albatross chicks with LaPerouse Pinnacle in the background.

A few jellyfish washed up on the beach last month. Here's one of them. At least the tentacles were missing or this would hurt.

This is a school of Hawaiian flagtails above a school of yellow-fin goatfish. This is next to the rocks that protect the north side of Tern Island.

Albatross Banding

2010-06-20T18:19:00.005-10:00

This week we had another visit from the Kahana to pick up our trash, supplies, and personnel for return to Honolulu. The turtle techs as well as Paula, Ruth, and Sarah went back, and right now we have 5 volunteers, 3 seal crew and 1 manager. The new volunteers are learning quickly how we do things here (expecially how to keep the place clean). We also got almost 600 albatross chicks banded this week, and only another 2000 (or so) to go. We won't be able to slow down until we get that done though.

The turtles have been active around here lately, finding ways around our fences and getting stuck in various places on the island. We've had to help a few back to the beaches or back into the water in the last couple of weeks. We don't like them crawling over the entire island because they'll just crawl over anything in their way, so birds can get crushed by them.

This week has been busy, as usual, but of course it's also beautiful here as usual.

We have a vagrant bird visiting. It looks like a short-eared owl. It hides all day long in the rocks because the brown noddies harrass it non-stop when it isn't hiding. It'll probably stay around a little while longer.

Many of the sooty tern chicks have hatched and are growing quickly. They still have to watch out for the frigatebirds, which have eaten quite a few of them so far this summer.

The small boat from the Kahana had some engine trouble, so we helped them bring the last load of supplies to the ship.

Keith and Paula are helping to take down the turtle camp tent on East Island.

Here is a picture I got from Caitie. I think a good title for it is "Another Day at the Office"
(that's me looking at the coral near Disappearing Island). It would be nicer if I got to do that every day, but I get to do it more often than a lot of people, so I can't complain too much.

2 Ships and a lot of Visitors

2010-06-14T20:33:00.004-10:00

This week was pretty busy with 2 ships. On Monday, the Robert C. Seamans, part of the Sea Education Assoc. (SEA) from Woods Hole, MA, came to visit with 26 students and faculty from the University of Hawaii and 14 crew. They were here for 3 days to learn about French Frigate Shoals and some of the biology and management issues we have here. They got the chance to count various types of coral, do some water sampling and see some of the marine debris and plastic that affects the seabirds. It seemed like they all had a great time. We even took the whole island population over for dinner and a tour on Tuesday evening. It was a good visit. They left Wednesday afternoon.
The Kahana came to bring our summer food and supplies on Wednesday morning. It was a pretty smooth offload and we should be able to make it a few more months with what we've got. They also brought 4 new volunteers, Keith, Pablo, Phillip, and another Sarah. So far, I've had a Sarah in every group except one. Caitie left on the Kahana and Sarah, Ruth, Paula, and the turtle techs (Tammy and Kristen) will be heading back on the return trip to Honolulu. The ship is coming back Thursday, so we're getting all of our trash ready to put on the ship. It will be a little less busy next week, logistically speaking, but we're still busy banding albatross chicks so don't worry about us getting bored around here.

The Robert C. Seamans is a 134', brigantine rigged ship. It was really nice, as you can see.

Here's a view of the Kahana. It's nice too, but a little more utilitarian.

This is a crazy nest. The red-footed booby adopted this frigatebird chick. We see the frigatebird parent coming back to feed it, but the booby chases it away. It's apparently getting food from someone though.

This is Pablo getting his banding practice for the albatrosses, with Dasha holding it for him.

This sooty tern was bothering the Laysan albatross as it was trying to feed its chick. The albatross didn't end up catching it, but almost.

These are some more fish on the roof. It's 2 Hawaiian whitespotted tobies (I put them next to each other so I could get by with one picture instead of two). The terns probably dropped them there.

Preparation

2010-06-06T12:13:00.007-10:00

This week there wasn't a lot that was new, although we have a few new seal pups born, and a few more turtles nesting. We are mainly preparing for this week when we have a University of Hawaii class visiting. They will be coming Monday morning on the Woods Hole research vessel Robert C Seamans. They'll be here for a couple of days learning about coral and management issues at French Frigate Shoals. The day after they leave, we'll be getting our supplies on the Kahana. We'll also be getting 4 new volunteers and losing one volunteer, see you later, Caitie. We'll have a week or so of turnover time, and then the other volunteers and Paula (asst. mgr) will be heading back to Honolulu.
I've got a lot of prep work, so I'm keeping this week's entry relatively short.

Here's one of the issues with our seawall. Turtles get in and can't get out. They aren't any good at backing up, especially when they get wedged in somewhere. I had to first dig, then pull this female out today with help from Dasha. I'm guessing it was about 175 lbs.

Here's a sooty tern family with a brand new chick under wing.

I haven't shown you a red-tailed tropicbird flying for a while, so here's one.

The brown boobies nest on LaPerouse Pinnacle. The chicks look a lot like the masked booby chicks.

Dasha got a chance to go out with the seal crew last week. She got the rare chance to see our resident spinner dolphins. They don't like the boats much, I think mainly because we can't go fast enough to make a good wake for them to play in. On Midway they liked playing around the boats.

Disappearing Island and Visitors

2010-05-31T16:02:00.006-10:00

It was another fun week, as always. We're up to about 1,000 albatross chicks banded, and started the banding of the Bonin petrel chicks also. There's not many of them here though. We're also still banding red-tailed tropicbird chicks and will be for most of the year.
We also took a boat trip to the southern tip of the atoll, to Disappearing Island. It's there most of the time, but not always. The water is beautiful down there, so we had to have a look around. There are a few pictures below.
The Hi'ialakai stopped in again on its way back down to Honolulu. They're still doing reef surveys and more maritime archeological work on the shipwrecks around here. A few of the researchers and crew got to visit the island this time. They rarely get the chance to step on island, but the ocean swells were sort of high, making diving difficult, so they had a little extra time.
Other than that, we've got the usual stuff going on around here. Lots of chicks, lots of eggs of different species, and lots of noise from the sooty terns.

One of the small boats from the Hi'ialakai is dropping off a group of visitors to see the island.

Clockwise from left are Sarah, Dasha, me, Tammy, and Ruth with Disappearing Island above the waterspot on the left of the picture (photo courtesy of Caitie Kroeger).

Disappearing Island is relatively large right now but may be gone in a month or two, but then again, it may not.

An old lobster trap still sits on the bottom near the island. The black fish are Achille's tangs, and the yellow one is a relatively recent introduction to the Hawaiian Islands (1958). It is a bluestripe snapper. My underwater camera is off for repairs, so I borrowed Caitie's camera to take all of these pics.

Here's a chevron butterflyfish. These are very rare in the Hawaiian archipelago, but fairly common here because they only eat (genus) Acropora coral, commonly called table coral, seen here just behind the fish. Acropora coral is only common in Hawaii at French Frigate Shoals.

Here are a couple more Achille's tangs, yellow tangs, and ornate butterflyfish about 20 ft down.

Here's the reverse view that the volunteers see out their windows.

The wedge-tailed shearwaters really like to nest in the boat house. It's far nicer than their usual burrows. It makes the boat difficult to take out, and we frequently have to scoot the eggs out from under the trailer tires. At least these birds are pretty good at knowing they are supposed to move. The albatross chicks just sit and snap at the trailer, thinking that that'll scare it away or make it turn around.

Population 11

2010-05-23T21:07:00.004-10:00

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.

Visitors

2010-05-16T21:45:00.006-10:00

As usual in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, things don't work out quite as planned. The ship "Oscar Elton Sette" didn't show up today, because they had some issues and won't be able to make it for another few days. Another NOAA ship paid a visit to French Frigate Shoals though. The Hi'ialakai stopped by for a couple of days on their way up the chain. They were doing some reef surveys, archeological surveys, and collecting the receivers from the shark tagging project that was done here last year.
We finally found some seal pups this week. We had 2 on Trig island, 1 on East Island, and 1 on Little Gin Island. We only saw them from the boat with binoculars, so I don't have pictures. The turtles have also started nesting. I've only found a few nests so far, but there are a lot of turtles around, so I'm sure we'll be getting a lot more in the next couple of weeks.

The Hi'ialakai stays pretty far out to sea so they don't hit any of our reef. The "Oscar Elton Sette" looks the same, but I might have some closer pics of that next week.

This is one of the safeboats from the Hi'ialakai. They were checking to see what was growing on our seawall. It usually takes me a year or two to get the data that they collect on these trips. I normally get that when the publications come out, so don't ask me what they found yet.

This is a young bluespine unicornfish. It will grow a long "horn" in front of it's eyes as it gets older. The blue spines are just barely visible near its tail (on the caudal peduncle for those that know what that is). Those are the fish's defense. I have a couple of pictures of the adults, which get about 2 ft long, but they aren't as close so they aren't that nice to look at.

This is a Hawaiian whitespotted toby. These little fish are pretty much everywhere around here. I've been putting more fish pictures up lately because the water is finally calming down for the summer and we've been going snorkeling more often.

Again, another Tern island sunset.

Population 6

2010-05-09T18:36:00.003-10:00

We have one more week of Tern Island - Population: 6 Next weekend we are expecting the Sette with the 3 seal and 2 turtle techs. It'll be nice to change things up a little bit. So far there's still nothing for them to count though. We haven't seen any seal pups yet (although there are some that look pretty close to having pups) or haven't seen any turtles nesting yet (although they've starte digging some pits, but no nests yet). I'd guess both will happen this week.

Yesterday we started our albatross chick banding. We've got to band every chick on the island, so it'll take over a month to get them all. At least no one will be able to complain about not getting banding experience out here.

The weather has been nice out here so we've been snorkeling a lot lately. That's why I've been having the fish and turtle pics lately. I've got a few more from today. I should really quit taking pictures. My camera keeps track of how many I've taken and so far it's been 135,021 since I got it just before getting to Midway in June of 2007. I'm probably up over 140,000 counting my underwater camera. I still see something new every day, so I guess I'll keep it up.

This is the first albatross chick banded for the season. Only a few thousand left to go. Paula is holding it, Dasha is putting on the metal band and Caitie is putting on the field readable auxiliary band.

This is one of the brown noddies that frequents the front deck.

Every once in a while we find a dead fish up on the barracks roof. This flying fish was probably regurgitated by a booby, then picked up by a frigatebird, which was then chased by other frigatebirds, perhaps being stolen by a couple different birds, before finally being dropped on the roof. At least that's what usually happens.

This Japanese liquor bottle looks like it's been in the ocean for a while. It floated by while I was swimming.

Today was the first day I've seen one of these fish. It's a barred filefish.

This curious turtle who was wondering what my camera was.

More fish, birds, and turtles

2010-05-02T14:32:00.006-10:00

Again, it was another nice week. We got some good work done, like finishing up the seawall that I showed you last week. It's full now. Paula and the volunteers got the decks fixed up a bit and as usual, we counted and banded some birds. We also got some more snorkeling in. Now that the spring weather is here, the snorkeling is getting a bit better. Smaller ocean swells and less current make it a little easier to swim. In about 2 weeks we are getting a few more people on the island. We'll be getting 3 seal techs, that work for National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, which is part of NOAA) and 2 turtle techs. They will switch out camping on East island and monitoring the turtles over there. We'll have 11 people on island so we're keeping the water use down, so still going to have our minimal showers and toilet flushing. At least the ocean works well for cleaning off at the end of the day.

This is a bluestripe butterflyfish. They are a Hawaiian endemic fish. That's a convict tang in the background.

Sarah is pulling out a few weeds in front of the barracks.

I thought I'd show you the status of the albatross chicks. Some of them are still sort of small.

And some of them are getting close to being fully feathered.

The turtles are really starting to congregate on the beaches. Here's quite a few on East beach.

The Bulwer's petrels are coming back. These are the ones that sound like dogs barking. These 2 keep trying to nest in the tractor shed, which really isn't a very good spot.

I found a little plastic container this winter which had some dentures and a chain with a cross. It is engraved "Christmas - Richard with love - Mother 1963" This was one of my more unique finds.

It's finally warm here

2010-04-25T07:51:00.009-10:00

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.

Nothing Exciting this Week

2010-04-18T08:34:00.005-10:00

This was a week of getting a lot of little projects done around the island (yawn!). We have mostly caught up with our bird studies, so now it's time to catch up on things like getting the rust off of tools and straps.

Ruth and Dasha are having a great time.

I usually don't show you all of the pictures of the tedius little maintenance work that we do here, because you can probably go to your neighbor's garage and see the same thing. But every now and then I should put these up so that volunteer applicants see that it's not all looking for marine debris with snorkel gear and interacting with the birds out here. But since you are on my blog looking to see things that you probably can't see in your neighbor's garage, here's some pictures from snorkeling last Sunday.

I haven't looked at what type of hermit crab this is, but it was a nice spot of color in the dead coral.

We don't see too many jellyfish around here (mostly Portuguese man-o-war's), but there were a couple floating around the boat dock last week. I took at least 30 pictures of these two and others, but this was the only one where they actually looked like jellyfish.

There is a boat hull upside down in about 15 ft of water and there are always some good fish around it. Usually a shark or two hiding underneath also. Here are 2 common longnose butterflyfish, a raccoon butterflyfish, and a bad angle on a Hawaiian dascyllus.

Here's another picture of Caitie taking a turtle picture. We see a lot of them this time of year since it is almost nesting time. The turtles are usually pretty curious underwater, and we try to stay pretty still to not bother them. They'll usually swim around us for about 30 seconds, then decide we aren't worth looking at anymore, then they go off on whatever business they had before we swam by.

Late Post

2010-04-13T23:29:00.005-10:00

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.

More internet trouble, so more pics this week

2010-04-04T22:23:00.006-10:00

I didn't get a blog posted last week, as you probably noticed. Our computers are acting up again and it takes too long to upload photos. I finally got them all up so here you go.

The Kahana came back from its trip up to Midway. We loaded our recycling, trash, and a few other things going back to Honolulu. We also said goodbye to Greg, who was a great help with the invasive weeds for the last week. And Melinda also left. She's done satellite tagging her albatrosses for the season. Tern Island's population is now 6 and will be until the seal and turtle people get here in May.

The turtles are getting ready to dig nests. We are seeing a lot more on the beach these days. We've also seen a couple of pregnant seals, so we should be seeing some pups relatively soon.

Today, after our Easter egg hunt, we had a nice Easter dinner of fried spam (we're out of ham), naan (bread), Czech spinach, and pineapple casserole. It reminded me of my grad school potlucks when all the foreign students brought their country's random dishes. It was tasty, and we're all stuffed.

The NOAA seal crew's boat is being loaded onto the Kahana. The weather was windy, rough, and rainy. It kept things interesting.

We take two boats out when we go, so here is the other boat next to LaPerouse Pinnacle.

We had a picnic on Trig Island during our albatross chick count on the other islands. From right to left: Ruth, Dasha, Caitie, Sarah, Greg, Paula (Melinda is behind me taking other pictures). It was kind of a cloudy, but the wind was low, so it wasn't bad. We didn't get as sunburned as usual.

Here are the glass floats that we found so far this winter on the other islands within the atoll, with a pool ball and soft ball thrown in for scale.

This is another Laysan/Black-footed albatross hybrid. This one stays on East Island. We have one that likes to be on Tern. Hybrids don't seem to like each other though, they prefer one species over the other. They have a mixed species dance, so it's tough for them to get mates, although on Midway, I've seen them on nests. We don't know if it is their egg or not when we see that.

Humpback whale. This is as good as I could do with my little camera zoomed all the way, and zoomed some more on the computer. We passed by a couple on the way from East Island to LaPerouse Pinnacle.

This white tern chick couldn't figure out how to get this fish swallowed. It dropped it on the ground, so I gave it back, but head first, so it all worked out.

The Masked booby chicks are getting bigger than their parents.

Sarah gets to do the plot with the Tristram's storm petrels. They are finally old enough to band now. She just banded this little one and is about to put it back in its burrow.

This is a Grey-backed tern chick that was just hatched today. It's already walking around looking for a good hiding spot from the frigatebirds.

Busy Saturday

2010-03-21T20:55:00.007-10:00

The Kahana paid us another visit on Saturday and brought us another 3 months worth of supplies. We should be set pretty well with groceries and supplies for when the monk seal crew and the turtle techs get here in May. It got a little busy on Saturday since we also had to have a plane fly in with a freezer repairman for the Kahana. It all worked out, but I'm hoping I won't need another plane during a supply offload anytime soon. At least we had extra help from the volunteers and staff heading out to Laysan Island. It was nice to have one of my ex-volunteers going there (Whitney) so she could help out as a tour guide for all of our island visitors. We had 20 people here for a little while, including the pilots.

I'll have a little more help this week since I got another volunteer. Caitie will be helping us out for a few months. Also, for those of you who used to read my Midway blog, you'll recognize the name Greg. Greg and I got rid of quite a few invasive plants during my year on Midway. He's here to help out for a week and a half with my invasive weeds. He should be able to get rid of quite a few of them since this island is only about 34 acres, compared to about 1200 acres on Sand Island at Midway (of course he's not done with that yet). We'll get all kinds of projects done with all of these people here now!

I just noticed I didn't take any pictures of the Kahana or airplane this time. Oh well, you can check my older posts if you want to see them again. Just pretend they are from Saturday.

Here's Caitie getting a good picture of a green sea turtle.

Here's a reef whitetip shark (I took this picture a couple of weeks ago). It was too close to fit in the frame.

You need at least one picture of the birds.

I'm a week late on posting this picture, but this is some of the trash that has washed up on Gin Island. There isn't any vegetation over there. Just some seals, sand, birds, and marine debris. We picked up a bit, but we can't fit all of this in the boat in one trip.

Just another Tern Island sunset.

Nice weather

2010-03-14T15:55:00.009-10:00

This past week was a pretty good week out here. We got a lot of birds counted and even finally got out on the boat again. The trade winds have been blowing us around for the last few weeks, but yesterday was beautiful and we checked up on the condition of the other islands. It was good to see that they didn't get washed over like last year. We are expecting the Kahana (supply ship) later this week, so it's time to get the trash all packed up to send back to Honolulu. We would normally really be looking forward to getting the fresh food, but since we just came back with some fresh groceries after the evacuation, it will just be really good, instead of really, really good. So here's a few pictures and I'll throw in a couple now and then from the last few months. Maybe next week I'll show our Christmas tree.

White banded surgeonfish and convict tangs swim around in large schools around LaPerouse Pinnacle.

This monk seal swam by to check us out.

Here's Melinda helping to unload the big pile of ropes that we found while we were out. At least there were no animals entangled in it.

A white tern is bringing a little squid or cuttlefish to its chick.

I was up on the roof of the barracks and took this.

On Christmas Eve, I found a glass fishing float still wrapped in it's netting. That's the first one I've found in a net. It took a long time to get all that algae off too. We found a couple on East Island yesterday too.

Let's Try This Again

2010-03-07T20:57:00.012-10:00

I don't really know where to begin. It's been a while and a lot has gone on around here since my last real post in September. Shortly after I left, the island was evacuated for Hurricane Neki (at least I posted that one). No one was on island for a few weeks and then Ty and Alex came back and started getting the place fixed up. Two freezers and four refrigerators full of food went bad since the power was off, but it was taken care of with a little help from the crew of the NOAA ship "Oscar Elton Sette". Ty and Alex held down the fort until I got back with a new volunteer crew in December. We've been a little shorthanded over the winter, so it's been busy.

A week before last Monday, it looked like we were finally going to catch up on things with the addition of 2 more people and the return of the internet. One of those people was Dasha, my wife, who'll be volunteering for a few months now that she just graduated with her Ph.D. in Pharmacology. It'll be a nice break from lab work. The asst. manager position was also filled, so when you hear me mention Paula, that's who I'm talking about. I said "looked like" we'd catch up because 5 days later we got evacuated for a possible tsunami from the earthquakes near Chile. It was good that there was no wave since the elevation of the island is only about 6 feet. At least I got to take care of some busines and get a few supplies during my 5 days in Honolulu.

The usual things are going on around the island; the albatross chicks and Tristram's storm petrel chicks are getting bigger, the great frigatebirds, red-footed and masked boobies, red-tailed tropicbirds, Bonin petrels, and gray-backed terns are all laying eggs, thousands of sooty terns are hovering over the island, and the whales are swimming around outside of the atoll.

That's the quick update for 6 months' worth of things going on. I thought about writing a lot of detail or actually writing with some sort of style instead of just a few lines about what went on, but that would be too much reading. I don't like to read a lot of pages on the computer, so I try to keep it sort of short and just show a few pictures. I keep threatening to write with more adjectives, but for the moment, I'll spare you.

Laysan albatross flying.

Here's another Laysan albatross shading its chick.

Here's a black-footed albatross chick panting in the sun. It seems like it may not be a great food year and many of the chicks are being left sooner than usual.

The frigatebirds are busy trying to find mates. The males sit in their spot and the females fly over to evaluate. Almost all of the males are displaying right now, so the bushes are pretty colorful.

The old seawall still looks the same and the water still looks like a swimming pool.

Here we are at the Lihue airport on Kauai on our way back to Honolulu. It's me, Dasha, Sarah, Ruth, Paula, and Melinda. I know we're tiny so you'll have to take my word for it. We only left with what we had in our pockets, since the plane couldn't take extra weight.

Here's a closer up picture of Dasha out meeting the neighbors (the birds, in case you didn't get it).

Back to Tern

2009-12-06T17:59:00.003-10:00

I've got some bad news for now. The internet on the island is out thanks to the Hurricane Neki evacuation. I'm going to try to get it going when I get back out there, but it might not work until our next plane in February. It was a good time off the island and I got some good Wilderness First Responder training in Bend, OR (which is a really nice town, by the way). The Kahana is Taking us out in the morning in the biggest swells in 40 years in Hawaii. It's going to be a rough ride. I'll fill in some details if I ever get the internet back. So I hope I don't lose too many of you. I don't even have any pictures to put up, but don't worry, I'll be back.

Hurricane Neki

2009-10-21T16:45:00.003-10:00

If you've been following Hurricane Neki, you might have noticed it's supposed to get very close to French Frigate Shoals. The island was evacuated by a Coast Guard C-130 today, so Ty, all 4 volunteers, and all 5 construction workers are safe and sound in Honolulu.
Once the hurricane passes, the Coast Guard will fly over and survey any damage. So we'll have to wait and see, but at least everyone's fine.

Here's a link to the video of the Coast Guard plane landing on Tern.

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=687665

Last blog for a while

2009-09-20T20:46:00.002-10:00

As always, it was another busy week. On Wednesday, we had some visitors stop in from the office in Honolulu and the from the Regional Office. They hopped on the Kahana at Midway so they could see how things are going on Laysan, French Frigate Shoals, and Nihoa. After a tour of Tern Island, Ty and I got lunch on the Kahana, then took the group to East Island and snorkeling at LaPerouse Pinnacle. It's always good to give people a look underwater, since the atoll has only about 67 acres of land and 232,000 acres of coral reef. Sarah (volunteer) left on the Kahana too so now we have 4 volunteers to take care of business until Dec.

We had a plane on Friday. Another 10 minutes and we wouldn't have. It started pouring rain just after it landed. I'm sure they would have had to turn around like last week since the visibility would have been too bad. We don't have a full service airport here so pilots have to fly on visual flight rules. It's tough to land if you can't see the island. The runway got covered in water, but thanks to our high tech water removal equipment (the volunteers and a bunch of brooms), most of the water was swept off of the main takeoff path.

If all goes well, I'll be out on the plane tomorrow (Monday). On my time off, I'll be doing some first aid training in Bend, OR, working in the office in Honolulu, and hanging out in Cleveland, and whatever else looks good while I'm gone. I may or may not make any vacation posts, we'll see if there's anything interesting in the rest of the world. If not, then I'll probably post when I get back here in Dec. See ya!

This is Round Island. It comes and goes. I hope it stays around long enough for this pup to wean. You can see Tern Island on the horizon. I wish I could bring my nice camera in the boat, but I'm not taking the chance on it getting wet. This is about as good of a zoom as I can get with my little waterproof Olympus.

These are "Nenue". That's the Hawaiian name for various species of chubs, which all look very similar, so we'll stick with nenue. They are very common around here and every now and then we'll see a yellow one in a school of gray ones.

Here is a bluefin trevally swimming below me. They usually follow seals around to see if they scare up any food. They also follow people around, until they see that we aren't doing anything interesting. They are fairly big and get up to 25 pounds. The giant trevally, which also follow seals and people, get a lot bigger, about 5 ft and 150 lbs. My pictures weren't as good of those guys this time.

This is a blue-grey noddy on LaPerouse Pinnacle. It's a bit fuzzy since I had to zoom in a lot on the computer, otherwise it would have just looked like another guano spot.

This is what our warehouse looks like with no walls. It's probably a little more interesting for people who've been out here before. It should be all fixed up by the time I get back.

This is the runway today. It looks a little better than it did a couple of months ago.

New volunteers and rain

2009-09-13T22:01:00.007-10:00

I got the new helpers on Monday. I'm glad that Adam and Sarah are still around to help show them the ropes. Ty is catching on quick for all the "acting manager" jobs that he'll have around here while I'm at training and on vacation. He says it reminds him of working on a ranch, with all the cooking, cleaning, and other chores that everyone has to pitch in on. He also said, "You have a really cool job". I know.
We finally got some rain. The problem is that it came the day the plane was bringing more construction workers. They got here and the visibility was terrible and there were big lakes on the runway. They flew over, took a look, then flew back to Honolulu. It rained again the next night, so we got up early and took brooms and spread all of the puddles around to dry them out. It was a pretty big job to get that done. It ended up being pretty dry so at least the plane could land on Wednesday. It was a bit muddy though. I'm hoping it doesn't rain on the 21st, since that's when I'm supposed to be flying off.
I finally got a Sunday off today, so I went snorkeling with the new people, went for a run, and watched "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels". So absolutely no work today. The construction guys worked a half day, and were glad they could get finally get off the hot roof for a bit.

Here comes some of our supplies and new volunteers. The Kahana is in the background.

I'm training Ty on how to get through the little channels to get to the other islands. We took our lunch along and ate it on Trig Island. I think we need one palm tree on this island. I believe some introductions are in order; Sarah, Erika, Alex, Ty, Adam, and Katie are in the picture.

Here is one of two Bristle-thighed curlews that are visiting right now. They usually prefer the other atolls for some reason. They nest in Alaska and take their winters on islands and atolls throughout the pacific. Last I heard there's only about 7,000 of them in the world.

This is the other curlew that's here. I'm glad it got this grasshopper. It's invasive and we're trying to get rid of them. It was interesting to watch the bird try to kill the grasshopper before it could eat it. It would shake it up to stun it, then slam it on the ground, and catch it again before it could get away. These grasshoppers are tough, this one is about 4" long and even a stomp with the old shoe usually doesn't phase them. These birds will also eat other birds eggs, which they crack open by hitting them with rocks.

Here's another uncommon shorebird I haven't shown you before. The little light colored bird is a sanderling. The other 4 are ruddy turnstones. The turnstones are always around but there are only a couple of sanderlings here each season.

Happy Labor Day

2009-09-06T22:54:00.004-10:00

It's another working weekend for us on Tern Island. We had a plane today, which brought a runway inspector and John and Josh, who'll be working on the warehouse. They came today so that they can help unload the Kahana tomorrow. It's bringing the rest of the construction materials, plus 3 new volunteers and Ty, who'll be taking care of things out here while I'm gone. He usually takes care of Tern Island from Honolulu, so now he gets some hands on experience. We are losing 2 volunteers, Whitney gets to take the Kahana to Midway and fly back from there, and Therese will fly back to Honolulu from here in a few days. Sarah will stay to help train the new volunteers and take the Kahana back, and Adam will stay out here a while longer.
We'll have another plane the day after tomorrow with a few more construction workers. So we're well on our way to the 14 that'll be here when I leave. Things are really busy around here, but it feels good to see some results.

The plane is taking off for Honolulu.

Since I talked about the nice view I had while running my 10k's, I thought I'd show you. This picture shows the nice blue water, but it also makes it look like a desert island with all the dead vegetation. It has been really dry out here lately, but still beautiful.

Sarah and Whitney were watching the seal crew do their work. The sooty tern was just looking for a good spot for..... whatever they use their spots for?

This brown noddy chick is only a couple of days old and wandered out into the middle of the runway. Either that or a frigatebird dropped it before it could eat it (more likely). I put it off to the side, near the most likely parents, but its chances aren't good.

I haven't shown you a baby turtle for a few weeks. Here's one that we let go early in the morning and is almost home.

New Manager

2009-08-30T21:41:00.006-10:00

OK, it's supposed to be official as of today that I am the new manager of Tern Island. I was only "acting" manager up until now. I had to be here a year before I was eligible for the increase in grade. It won't change anything, but I'll at least get a raise.

We've been busy, as usual, out here. This time we've been clearing out the warehouse so the construction work can start in a week or so. It's really difficult to find other places to store all that, since that's why we have the warehouse in the first place. They should be done with it by late Nov, so I'll just have to keep things cluttered until then.

I've still had time to continue with my jogging. I decided 5k wasn't enough excercise though, so I bumped it up to 10k. Now that's enough excercise, at least for the time being. That's 5 laps around the runway. The scenery is great, so it doesn't get old. And some of the meaner birds like to try to peck my head at certain spots on the loop. It keeps me paying attention at least.

We'll be starting our flights this weekend. Many of the sooty terns have gone and I hope even more leave by the weekend so none of them get hit. The Kahana will be coming up on Labor day to bring the rest of the construction gear and 3 new volunteers. Ty will also be coming out from Honolulu to act as manager while I get my time off the island in Oct/Nov. So there's only one more week of 5 people, then by next week, we'll be back up to about 13 people. It makes cooking night a little harder, but other than that, it should be alright.

I took a little time this week to go out with Whitney and band some Bulwer's petrel chicks. We have these nest boxes for them since it hard for them to dig burrows with all the coral chunks everywhere. They use them quite a bit. Here, there are 3 chicks out of 4 nest boxes.

There was another nice sunset this evening.

This red-footed booby was just watching me work on the tractor.

This is one of my favorite little fish. It's a Hawaiian cleaner wrasse. They have little cleaning stations where bigger fish come to get cleaned. This picture is a little blurry, but I've been trying to get a picture of one forever, so this is as good as it gets.

Tern Island - Population: 5

2009-08-23T21:00:00.008-10:00

I thought being on a little island out in the middle of the ocean meant kicking back, reading some books and watching the wildlife. Not quite, apparently. We had 2 more ships this week. Really, they were the same 2 as last week, but instead of big offloads, we had big onloads. The Sette came through on Thursday and picked up the seal crew and all of their stuff. They also picked up the 6 seal pups that they tagged last week. I got an email from them saying that they let them go at Nihoa and everything is good with them. I hope they make it. We had one pup that just weaned that didn't make it. It was attacked by a shark a couple of days ago, but finally died yesterday, probably from infection.

The Kahana came today to pick up all of our trash and recycling from the last 5 months. Elizabeth also went aboard and is headed back to Honolulu. We are now down to the usual island poplulation of 5. Four volunteers and me. It's more cooking nights, entrapment walks, and cleaning duties for each of us, but it's kind of nice to have it so low key. All of the people who come out here are great, but it's just nice to have it slow down sometimes. When the construction on the warehouse starts in a few weeks, we'll be back up to 15 again. So I'm enjoying it while I can.

We're getting all of our trash into pallet tubs to put on the Kahana this morning.

We're bringing out a boatload of gear to the Sette.

A young brown booby was checking out our propellers as we waited to pull up to the Sette.

This is a brown noddy with its albino chick. It can fly now, but the parent still feeds it. Like I've told you before about albinos, seabirds don't usually make it to adulthood. There are a lot of factors working against them like bad eyesight, sun damage, being picked on, more obvious to predators, etc.

Just a gecko on the window.

More Groceries

2009-08-16T21:56:00.007-10:00

It's been a very busy week with 2 ships and people coming and going. We offloaded the ship all day Saturday and had a couple of loads on Sunday morning, but we've got everything we need and we're back up to "good" on the food supply. And more importantly, we're good on the TP now too.

No one left on the Kahana today, but Elizabeth came on island to work on our emergency planning and supplies. She'll catch the Kahana on its way back from Midway to get back to Honolulu.

The volunteers have been working extra hard, so after the ship left this morning, I took them out for a reef survey where we snorkel around and look for entanglement hazards. We only found one net, but saw a lot of nice coral and fish. We also watched "Jaws" two nights ago. I remember when I first saw that as a kid. I was even scared to jump into the deep end of a pool for a couple of years. The one white-tip shark I saw today didn't worry me, but I think I'll wait on letting new volunteers watch it until after they've seen a few sharks. Along those lines, I think it's probably good that we don't have a copy of "The Birds" on island.

This is the landing craft from the Kahana bringing our food and construction materials.

A few of us took a break after work a couple days ago to go jump in the ocean.

This seal is going to be relocated to Nihoa where it will have a better chance of surviving than here. It's got a satellite tracker on it's back so it can be monitored. If no one is around to remove the device, it will just fall off when the seal molts.

Whitney is swimming through a school of little fish.

Here's Therese and Mark swimming around a nice bunch of coral.

Food and Mail

2009-08-09T21:04:00.009-10:00

The NOAA ship Oscar Elton Sette stopped by today and brought us some food. Even though Sunday is "fend for yourself" day when it comes to food, we decided it should be a big salad night, since everyone was probably going to have one anyway. I'm not really that big of a salad person, but I must say, it was pretty good. At least we've finally got more ingredients than pasta and beans (a slight exaggeration, but barely). It was great to get the mail today too. It's been a few months since our last mail. Thanks for the package, Dasha! The Kahana is also coming later this week to bring us even more food and supplies, so as usual it's either feast or famine around here.

We now have 2 fewer people on island. Jon, Austin, and Mike (shark catchers) left to catch the plane at Midway next week. Derek and Monica (monk seal biologists) also left to go to Laysan to do some seal work there for a week or so. We got 3 new visitors too. Charles, Bob, and Tenaya are here to also work with monk seals. They are going to relocate 6 weaned pups to Nihoa, where pups have a higher survival rate than French Frigate Shoals. A pup just got bit by a shark this week, the morning after it's mother left. This one had one of it's rear flippers bitten off, so it probably won't make it since even the perfectly healthy ones have a tough time. We were bummed that it was a pretty healthy female, since the population needs females more than males at this point. I hope the seals do well on Nihoa. They'll be satellite tagged so that NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service) can keep track of them for a little while at least.

Therese and Whitney are banding a Christmas shearwater chick. These are some of the best mannered birds on the island. They don't try to bite while they are being banded.

This Laysan albatross chick was just watching the waves smash the seawall a few inches in front of it. There are only a couple dozen left on the island now. All of the black-footed albatross are gone.

One more baby turtle picture for you. I sat by a nest a couple nights ago and waited for them to hatch out. I only had to sit there about 45 minutes until they decided it was time.

This is a bird I haven't shown you before. It looks just like a Great frigatebird, except for the white spots under its wing and it is a bit smaller. This is a Lesser frigatebird and they usually are found in the southern hemisphere.

Blogspot Finally Works Again (for now)

2009-08-02T22:46:00.007-10:00

I can finally do my own blogs again. Thanks for putting them up for me all those weeks Dasha. It must have been some setting that they changed, because our internet service is a little bit worse than usual. Oh well, it's always going to be something.

We've been finding more and more turtle hatchlings that are crawling around the island instead of finding their way into the water. They usually crawl toward light and with a bright, high moon like it is now, they sometimes go for the middle of the island instead of the surf.

The seal pups that have weaned also have been scooting up all over the island too. The runway isn't a good spot for them, so we have to put them back on the beach. I think they learn fairly quickly that there isn't much for them up here anyway.

We're getting ready for a couple of ships in the next couple of weeks. Next Sunday, the Sette will come and get the shark guys and 2 of the seal crew. They'll be dropping off 3 more people to help with some seal work that I'll tell you about next time. They'll also be bringing about 15 boxes of groceries for us, so we're kind of looking forward to that. A few days later, the Kahana will be bringing a lot of supplies and some construction materials to fix the warehouse up. We'll finally be getting some mail too. The last time we had that was in June. I hope people sent me some goodies!!

A baby green sea turtle is trying to get into the water. I put it in a bucket though and we let it go after sunset, since there are fewer fish and birds to eat them at night.

There was a question last week on the tagging. So Buzz, here's what the seal tags look like. This one was on Midway. They just put it on the tail flippers. With the sharks, they implant a tracking tag and they also give it a dorsal fin tag so they immediately if they've caught it before. I don't have pictures of that though.

This is a bush near the barracks that the black noddies love to nest in.

This is just a picturesque bush near the beach.

The brown noddies nest on the ground or on roofs and the chicks are usually white or gray when they are small. The black noddies nest in the bushes and the chicks are always black, except for the front of their head.

More Baby Turtles

2009-07-27T06:32:00.006-10:00

Dasha was away at hockey training last week so no one was around to publish my blog. Now that she's back, I'll catch you up on what we've been doing. Thank you Dasha!
In the last couple of weeks I got out on the boat a couple of times. I went to Trig island with the seal crew to go pick up a young pup that just weaned. We like to get them away from Trig as soon as the mom leaves them, mainly because of shark predation. This one already had a bite and it was only on its own for less than a day. It wasn't a really serious bite and seals are pretty good at healing, so it shouldn't die from that.
I also went on the boat with the shark tagging crew. I guess the sharks had better stuff to do than get tagged that day, because we didn't get a single one. Usually they at least catch some kind of shark, like sandbar sharks, or gray reef sharks even if they don't tag them. I saw one shark earlier today when I went snorkeling. It was a white tipped reef shark so it wasn't one that gets tagged either. I don't know where all the Galapagos and Tiger sharks went. If they stay away at least a few more albatross chicks might make it out of here.
It was nice to get out and snorkel today too. It's been a while since I've gone. I saw a bunch of green sea turtles swimming around and a monk seal came over to see what I was up to. The water was a bit cloudy, but I'm sure none of you feel sorry for me.
Mike and Austin are pulling in the shark line.

Here's a picture of them from a few weeks ago with a decent sized tiger shark. The seal crew happened to be passing by when they were tagging it. Thanks to Monica Bond for the picture. The sharks are usually pretty docile when they are flipped over on their backs.

It's time to start digging out hatched turtle nests. After the nest hatches, we give them a few days and then dig into the nest to make sure there are none stuck under big hunks of coral. Here you see Therese, Sarah, Whitney, and Adam with another 2 feet or so to go to get down to the nest.

There are a lot of nests hatching now, so between lost turtles on the runway and in the weeds, and digging out the stuck turtles, there are a lot to be saved.

I didn't get a picture of the seal today, but Derek Lee from the seal crew had this nice picture and said I could use it. So that's about what I was seeing except the water wasn't as clear today.

Baby Turtles

2009-07-12T15:02:00.005-10:00

It was another beautiful week. Lots of sun and enough wind to keep it from getting too hot. We got enough rain to supply water for another half of a day. There hasn't been much out of the ordinary going on except that the turtle nests have started hatching. That means when we do our entrapment walks every morning, we have to look for confused baby turtles that crawled up toward the runway instead of down to the water. We collect them in buckets to get them out of the heat and wait until after sunset to let them go. They will die within a few hours of being in the direct sunlight if we don't pick them up. The adults are still nesting, so that means we'll have to be on the lookout for them for at least the next 3 months. Saving baby turtles is always a popular activity around here.

Here's the first 2 baby green sea turtles in the bucket. If they can escape from all the predators, they may be back to start breeding here sometime within the next 20-50 years.

This mom and pup monk seal are always right near the barracks building. We can take pictures of them through the window.

Here's another Great frigatebird picture. This is all the way at the east tip of the island looking west. I've shown a lot of frigatebirds lately, but this was a good shot of the whole island, so you get another one.

Adam, Sarah, Whitney, and Therese are looking for the Bulwer's petrel nests. I showed you what they look like last time. They like to nest in places like the broken concrete at the old Coast Guard dump. That bird in front of the camera is a sooty tern. Objects in lens may not be larger than they appear.

A Normal Week

2009-07-06T10:02:00.015-10:00

It was a “normal” week on Tern Island. At least for us. The usual projects are still going on; seal monitoring, shark tagging, bird banding, and a lot of other smaller projects. We had an extra day off this week for the 4^th of July holiday. That was nice, but for most weeks, 2 days off is too much. I don't know if I mentioned it before, but we work 6 days a week here. Any more than one day off and people usually end up doing work projects anyway. Besides, there's really nowhere to go.

It's been fairly calm here this week, so we snorkeled on the outer side of the atoll. It's similar to the inside of the reef, but there's a lot more coral growing out there, and bigger schools of fish. I would show you a picture, but I had to send my little camera back for repair. The battery compartment won't register as closed, so it won't take any pictures. I also had other camera trouble. My lens for my nice camera went bad, (won't focus anymore). I had to send both off on the Sette with Dave, and he mailed them off. I hope I get them back when our next mail ship gets here in about 5 weeks. I still have my 100-300 mm zoom lens and an old 35-105 lens for my Canon. So I can still take some new pictures, and at least both things are still under warranty. I have enough pictures to keep showing new ones anyway, even if I couldn't take new ones for 5 more weeks.

Thanks for posting again, Dasha!

Here's a bird I haven't shown you before. It's a Bulwer's Petrel. It looks a lot like a Christmas Shearwater (which I've shown you), and a lot like a Tristram's Storm Petrel (which I haven't shown you). These birds are bigger than a Tristram's and smaller than a Christmas, but they all look pretty similar- nondescript, brown birds. Normally these birds live in holes or under things so you don't get pictures of them just sitting around in the daytime, but this little troublemaker was trying to nest under the tractor tire, so I have to keep putting him outside, until he finds somewhere better to nest. They have a weird call too. They sound like dogs off in the distance, “woof, woof, woof”.

Here's a fat little monk seal pup born this year. This little guy came swimming by while I was behind the seawall, so he couldn't see me. We always try to stay 150 ft from all of the seals, to minimize disturbance to them, but it would have been more of a disturbance for me to jump up and run away, than to sit and let it go by. This is one of the times that I was glad I still had my good zoom lens.

I haven't shown you a Gray-backed tern chick yet either. Here's one with its parent. They like to nest out in the open on the rubble.

Here's what that little chick will look like in a few more weeks. This one is almost ready to fly.

Another 50,000 reasons that we don't fly in April-August. For some reason, the sooty terns really like the runway.

A little bunch of Masked boobies are holding their ground on the runway. They like it there too, but there are not that many of them.

New Acting Manager

2009-06-28T15:41:00.008-10:00

Well, I'm acting Refuge Manager for the time being now that the NOAA ship “Oscar Elton Sette” showed up on Thursday and picked up Dave, Jim, Irene, and Sheri. The ship is doing lobster research on this cruise, and since they were coming by anyway, they were nice enough to give those 4 a ride. They also gave us a little fresh fruit and some much needed coffee. We had about 3 weeks of coffee left and our next supply ship isn't for almost 6 weeks. Even if you don't have great math skills, you can see that that's not good. We're doing canned and frozen food for 6 more weeks, but some people get pretty creative on their cooking nights and make great dinners.
The volunteers are finally done banding the albatross chicks. I didn't count exactly how many there were, but over 3,100. Although some of them have died, since the most of the parents have stopped feeding them. It's up to them now to learn to fly and find their own food. The Masked and Red-footed boobies are next on the list for banding. They bite a lot harder than the albatross chicks, but at least their bills aren't quite as sharp. So more bruises, but fewer scars.
The weather is getting a little less windy here so Jon, Mike, and Austin (the shark crew) can finally get back to their tagging. Their project is to tag tiger, Galapagos, and blacktip sharks and monitor where they go. Shark predation is a major cause of death for monk seal pups here. They've already got a few this year, so the more they understand the sharks movements, the more they can figure out how to minimize the loss. Most of the other islands rarely lose pups to sharks. French Frigate Shoals is a good example of a “predator dominated ecosystem”. So far they've caught over 100 different sharks (some too small to tag, or a kind that doesn't really eat pups), but it hasn't slowed down anyone's snorkel trips. It seems they prefer seal pups and albatross chicks.
Thanks for posting Dasha!

Since I didn't talk about turtles this time, you at least get a picture of one. Here's a male green sea turtle swimming by while I was snorkeling.

We've been collecting a lot of marine debris lately. The seals love to play with this stuff and sometimes get stuck in it. Most of this is just from the last few weeks. Sometimes it washes up on this island, but the seal crew picks up a lot of it on their boat trips across the atoll.

I thought this was kind of funny. Here's two different species of birds (red-tailed tropicbird chick and sooty tern adult) both with eggs from red-footed boobies. I'm sure the tern has an egg of it's own to worry about and the chick just doesn't care that it's there.

A Greater frigatebird is perched on one of our plot markers with sooty terns flying over.

Another Nice Week

2009-06-21T15:15:00.013-10:00

It's been a busy week once again with the usual things going on. The seals are having pups and keeping the seal crew hopping. The volunteers are still busy banding the 3000 or so albatross chicks, and we helped the turtle crew take down their camp on East Island, since they have to get all their gear cleaned and stowed by the time they leave (Wed. or Thur.). The shark guys have been taking a bit of time off because it's been pretty windy and choppy out in the atoll, and no one wants to fall in when they are tagging a 14 ½ ft tiger shark on their little 17 ft boat.
It's Dave's final week on the island too. He took a job at Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge so that will leave me in charge out here. It will probably take a while to get all the paperwork done to actually make me the manager, and it will take even longer to get another assistant manager out here. I hope a new asst. mgr can get out here faster than I did.
The maintenance volunteer, Jim, will be leaving on the Sette with Dave and the turtle crew, so there will be 4 fewer mouths to feed until the construction guys get out here this fall.Here are some Achilles Tangs for a bit of color. This is one of the Christmas shearwaters that we are monitoring. Here is the shark crew hoisting their boat onto their trailer. We don't use the boat ramp because it's too rough usually and the boat gets beat around too much. The hoist is easier. The young great frigatebirds are catching and eating small sooty tern chicks all the time. There are tens of thousands of chicks still around, but we still don't like to see them get eaten. The sharks are getting a lot of the black-footed albatross chicks too.Here's a sooty tern chick hiding under the Chenopodium. Of all the bird chicks on the island, the sooty and grayback tern chicks are the only ones that are scared of people. They are really the only ones that have predators here though. The frigatebirds leave the other chicks alone.

Seals, Turtles, and Sharks

2009-06-15T03:50:00.014-10:00

Things are still busy on Tern and our internet is still not up to par, but thanks to Dasha, I'm getting another blog out this week. Besides the seal, turtle, and shark work going on, the Hi'ialakai (NOAA ship) is here doing their own things, such as more shark tagging, and some archaeological diving. The Hi'ialakai looks exactly the same as the Oscar Elton Sette, which I showed you before. They brought us a big supply of food, so it's nice to have them come through. The volunteers are still trying to get our almost 3,000 albatross chicks banded. They are about 2/3 done, so their getting their practice in. The bird noises are a little different than when I left. It used to be albatross and red-footed boobies making all the racket while I tried to go to sleep, but now it's sooty terns and wedge-tailed shearwaters. The shearwaters sound pretty weird. They have 2 basic noises. One sounds just like a ghost from cartoons, a rising and lowering “ooooooooooooooo”, got that? And the other noise they make sounds like a baby crying. It usually only takes about 1 night to get used to the new birds when they get here.

A couple of the Black-footed albatrosses have already fledged. This guy needs another month or so. The sharks are starting to patrol the islands pretty closely looking for chicks who got in the water thinking they were all ready to fly, but really aren't. Quite a few of them have already been eaten.
Irene is measuring a turtle. There are 2 turtle techs here right now, Irene and Shari, and they camp over on East island since that is where most of the nesting takes place. They work at night and count, and monitor all of the nesting turtles that are there. They take turns coming back to this island after 3 or 4 days each. I went over one night and checked out what they do. It was very interesting, since I didn't get to see much nesting activity over at Midway. Over 90% of the population of Hawaiian green sea turtles nest here at French Frigate Shoals. Here we are coming back to Tern on the boat. These are 3 of the volunteers, Whitney, Sarah, and Adam. The weather has been great lately for getting over to the other islands.
Here's Mark, one of the seal crew, snorkeling out at LaPerouse Pinnacle. It only looks about 6 feet tall here, but it's really 120 ft. And good news. We saw a few blue-gray noddies back on the rock. We hadn't seen any since the peregrine falcon came around. So it's good to see there are at least 3 of them around.
Here's a Red-footed booby stretching its wing.
The Red-footed booby chicks are getting big now. Only a couple had hatched when I left. This chick must have had a tiring day of squawking, since it's yawning now, and they really don't do much. The Great frigatebird chicks are pretty big now too. None of them had hatched when I left.

2009-06-08T03:42:00.016-10:00

You're probably wondering why I haven't posted for a while, at least I hope you're wondering. It turns out that Google products do not work from the island anymore. Blogspot and Gmail are both out of commission here. So, I sent the text and my pictures to Dasha (my wife) and she's putting it up. Thanks Dasha! For those of you who were checking Mary's blog too, that's why she couldn't post either.
Anyway, I'm back on Tern island with 15 other people. It's pretty busy around here. There are 3 people tagging sharks to see where they go, 4 people monitoring and tagging monk seals, 2 people tagging nesting green sea turtles, 5 volunteers, and Dave and me. The good thing is that we are finally getting some of the food from 2003 eaten up. Today, I'll catch up on my ride back to Tern and show you some pictures of the other islands. They all look a lot alike. Low sand islands with no trees and a lot of birds.

Here we are unloading supplies on Green Island at Kure Atoll. Kure was also a Coast Guard station like Tern Island.

This is the old Coast Guard building. I got to spend the night here since I was helping set up.

The people at Kure will be staying in the tents since there's not enough room in the building.

The verbesina is almost as bad at Kure as it is at Midway.

This is Southeast island at Pearl & Hermes Atoll, aka Pearl & Hermes Reef.

This is a view completely across the island looking at the Oscar Elton Sette.

Here is the seal camp at Pearl & Hermes.

A population of Laysan finches was brought to Pearl & Hermes as a backup to the population on Laysan Island. They are very curious. About 50 of them came to check out the new supplies.

Some finches flew out to the ship and would not fly back to the island. We think that they were looking for fresh water, which was scarce on the island. We had to catch them, put them in this bucket, and have someone come out from the island in a boat to bring them back. The picture was taken through an air hole in the bucket lid.

This is Lisianski Island. See, most of these islands are similar, but you can tell them apart.

A monk seal watches us set up the tents on Lisianski for the seal monitoring crew that will be out here for the next couple of months.

Colleen and Angie sitting on the beach in front of their tents on Lisianski Island.

Technical Difficulties

2009-05-25T01:16:00.002-10:00

Sorry, I can't blog from the island right now due to technical difficulties. I'll try to figure it out soon.

Back at Midway

2009-05-18T15:01:00.008-10:00

I'm a little behind on my posting since I've been really busy lately, but now that I'm riding the ship, I've got my evenings free. It was really great to get back to Midway. Most of the people are the same, and there have been a few improvements, but overall it feels like I just went on a short vacation. The food was still great, the views were still great, and there were still a lot of birds. I was busy a lot of the time with computer training, but I got some time to go out on the boat with Cynthia Vanderlip (who normally lives on Kure Atoll) to do a dolphin survey. She was taking pictures of all of the dorsal fins of the dolphins for identification while I took GPS and depth measurements. We were out with the pods for a couple of hours so you'd think I'd get some really great pictures, but I only got a few decent ones. I also helped out with some plant work, and pulled a little verbesina for old time's sake. The island looks really good. Greg has some more help from the Thai guys (Sam & Moo) with spraying verbesina and they are almost keeping up. Really, things are so similar that I don't have much to say. It's pretty musch the same as I have on my "Pete at Midway" blog, but I'll put up a few pictures anyway.

Here's a ~10 ft tiger shark that we passed on the way to the dolphin survey. I put my small underwater camera over the side as we were going by. It didn't seem to mind.

See, there are still a lot of albatross chicks on Midway.

I got this picture the same way as the shark picture. That little Olympus is handy to have sometimes.

Here's one of the spinner dolphins jumping.

The mini-golf course is now open for business. We were working on this last spring.

The hydroponics greenhouse is up and running also, right now mostly for salad greens. The person running it got there the week before I left last year.

The cable houses are falling down pretty quickly now that there is absolutely no maintenance done on them right now.

I went snorkeling on Sunday morning and saw this little frogfish under the cargo pier.

Gary, John Klavitter, and Steve are extirpating the one cactus plant from the island.

The Laysan ducks had a bad year last year. Many of them died off due to botulism. The problem seems to have run its course and the ducks are doing well again. These ducks are getting snapped at by the albatross chick.

Here's a gratuitous white tern chick picture.

Here's my ride back to Tern. The "Oscar Elton Sette" is pulling up to the cargo pier. I'll either be back on the 19th or 20th after stops at Kure Atoll, Pearl & Hermes Reef, and Lisianski Island to drop off the monk seal crews.

Vacation Pics

2009-05-03T21:53:00.011-10:00

Finally! Here's a few pictures of my time off of the island. They've got nothing to do with Tern Island, but it's something to look at. I should be on Midway next weekend, so I'll do my next entry from there.

Spring crocus in Cleveland.

The beach at Lake Erie is a little different than the beach on Tern Island.

I went to a couple of battlefields on my time off. This is at Antietam in Maryland.

This is a memorial at a battlefield in Czech Republic where Napoleon's army was defeated.

This sign is telling you that you are at the border of Czech Republic and Germany. The tree is in Germany.

This is Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany. It was bombed in WWII and finally rebuilt a few years ago. The dark bricks are from the original church.

This is the view of Dresden from the top of Frauenkirche.

Random people on a sidewalk in Dresden.

Zwinger Palace in Dresden.

Zwinger Palace has a great art gallery in it.

This is the St. Wolfgang chapel near Krupka, Cz. Rep. This was built in 1700.

This church is in Most, Cz Rep. It was moved on rails 841 meters to make way for a coal mine. It was built in 1594.

We went on a few hikes. One place we went is called Milešovka and it's an old castle converted into a weather station.

We also hiked up a mountain called Bořeň. It was hazy the entire time I was in Cz. Rep.

This beautiful castle is called Karlstejn. They started building it in 1348.

View of Prague castle.

St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague castle.

Here's a view of the castle from the crowded Charles bridge.

Changing of the guard at Prague castle.

There was an Easter Market in the Old Town Square in Prague.

This is called Powder Tower because they used to store gunpowder there.

This is the national museum in Prague.

It was kind of odd to see these plastic penguins against the Prague backdrop.

We also went to a couple of soccer games in Dasha's hometown of Teplice.

These sculptures were in a town called Kutna Hora.

This is the Sedlec Ossuary where they have the bones of 40-70,000 people. Many were plague victims. A monk started arranging the bones and it's one of the weirdest places I've been. All of the decorations are human bones.

No Pics this time

2009-03-16T01:26:00.002-10:00

I'm in Shepherdstown, West Virginia for training right now, so no real blog. But in the mean time, if you want to see what's up on Tern Island, you can check out Mary Gibson's blog. She writes a lot more than I do, and she's got a new perspective on things so it will be a lot more interesting reading than my blog is. Go back and start reading at her oldest post (it's only once a week, like mine) for seeing what it's like to come out to these islands for the first time. It's good!

welcometoternmaryg.blogspot.com

Back in Honolulu

2009-03-08T18:00:00.004-10:00

I wasn't sure that I was going to do a blog this week from Honolulu, but I've got the time. The plane made it on schedule, and I gave the island back over to Dave. We also got a maintenance volunteer named Jim and Josh who'll be a short term volunteer to work with Melinda on her albatross tagging work as well as other stuff. I'll be really busy this week picking up the supplies for the island. I sure don't miss the traffic when I'm out on Tern. I miss the birds already. The tropicbird chicks are starting to come out now, and the boobies and frigatebirds will hatch while I'm gone too. I guess they'll make it without me though.

It looks like I might be going back to Midway in May on my way back to Tern. There will be some boat rescue training there that would be good for me to have on Tern. At the moment I'm scheduled to fly out with the Coast Guard on one of their C-130's (you can see a picture of it on my Midway blog). Then I would take the NOAA ship "Oscar Elton Sette" back to Tern (you can see that one on my Midway blog too). I'm hoping it will work out because I'd really like to get back there for a couple of weeks and see everyone. I'll try to post some pictures from my trip to the Czech Republic in April. It may be a few weeks before I post again.

Here's the volunteer group that's still out taking care of Tern. Cindy, Jim, Mary, and Melinda. They just came back from counting all the frigate bird eggs on the island. Thanks guys (and gals).

Here was my parting view of Tern island from the plane.

This is where I stay while I'm in Honolulu. There are 5 other people here at the moment, 1 budget person here on detail from D.C. (Hi Kathy!), and 4 new people for Laysan Island. A couple new Tern volunteers will be showing up this week also so the 7 beds in here will be full.

Bunkhouse living room.

Bunkhouse yard. There's a very busy street just past the fence.

The garage is getting full of supplies for both Laysan and Tern. The Kahana will be taking everyone in a couple of weeks.

Last Week

2009-03-01T21:46:00.005-10:00

The plane was a few days late, but Jim, Cindy, and Mary made it out here. And Brie, Kelli, Kevin, and Sarah all made it back, and Melinda is still here. These 3 are a lot busier since they have to learn all the ropes and jump into things at full speed, but it will settle down a little on Thursday when 3 more people come. I'll be going back to Honolulu, but they'll still be +2 on the help.

I haven't got to do anything fun with this group yet either. The weather has been overcast and really windy. They'll get their chance though (I hope).

I'll be doing some training in West Virginia, then going back to Cleveland for a week and a half. Then my wife (Dasha) and I will be visiting her family in the Czech Republic for a couple weeks. I'll be back here in May. I'm not sure what dates yet, but I'll try to do an update when I get back from CZ.

Here's an out of focus black noddy. I almost deleted it, but decided it looked cool enough to keep.

I got a couple more pictures of the barracks. Here's the common room where we watch our TV series and movies. Right now we're doing the 3 seasons of "Arrested Development".

Here's one of the unoccupied bedrooms. It's got a great ocean view, but that's too hard to get a good exposure. Nothing fancy, but it works. People usually find some sort of decorations out on the beach.

Here's a the baby red-footed booby that I showed you last week. Now it's about 3 1/2 weeks old. It's on the ground because it's nest disintegrated. I hope the parents keep feeding it.

Here's Mary. She'll be leaving the day I come back to the island. I was showing her how to catch and band tropicbirds under the warehouse building. She's obviously enjoying it so far.

New Volunteers

2009-02-22T19:16:00.004-10:00

After a couple of days delay, our last set of volunteers got out of here on Friday. They were a couple of days late (another little airplane glitch), but got out ok. Brie, Kelli, Kevin, and Sarah left, and Cindy, Jim, and Mary showed up. These 3 will be a little busier since they'll be doing the work of the last 4. Jim & Cindy have volunteered on Midway counting birds for a few years and I met them there originally, so it's good to see some familiar faces. With a lot of people, we didn't get much food on the plane. At least the Kahana is coming next month with our big resupply. I'll be off island for training and vacation the first week in March, so be ready for a little break from me. I'll give you a few more details next time.

There wasn't much newsworthy going on this week, except for new volunteers. So I'll just show you some of the colorful birds hanging around. I'll show you the different boobies on the island right now (you can keep the jokes to yourself, since they are probably not that original). It's only bird pictures this time, since there's so many. Next time I'll give you some non-birds.

The male red-footed boobies get colorful bills at breeding time.

This is a male & female that found a good nest site.

One red-footed booby chick hatched a couple weeks ago. These aren't like most of the other seabirds here that are born fluffy and cute.

This is a dark morph of a red-footed booby. They are gray, but breed with the normal colored ones. There are only about 10 of these or so on the island.

Here's a masked booby sitting on the ground. They are always on the ground, while the red-foots are always in the bushes or on walls.

This is the Nazca booby that I showed you before. It has been here twice, but nests in the eastern Pacific. It's not here now. This one has an orange bill instead of a yellow one.

Here's another eastern Pacific visitor with a red-footed booby. It's an Eastern Pacific brown booby (aka, Brewster's brown booby). It is considered a subspecies of brown booby, but will hybridize with the regular ones. We only see it every few days, and it's usually at LaPerouse Pinnacle instead of here I think.

This is one of our normal brown boobies that live here.

2009-02-22T16:58:00.001-10:00

Whales

2009-02-15T23:43:00.004-10:00

This is the last week of this group of volunteers. They've been here for about 4 months and will fly out on Wed., if there are no plane troubles. We're losing 4 volunteers and getting 3, so it will be a little busier around here until a couple more show up on the Kahana in March. I've only got a few weeks left before I go off island for training and vacation too.

We got out for a boat trip on Friday, now that we've had a few days of good weather. We saw a few humpback whales on our way to and from LaPerouse Pinnacle. They were pretty far away, but we could see their spouts, fins, and backs every now and then. I didn't want to disturb them, so we just watched them from afar (too far for pictures with my little camera). We could hear them singing when we jumped in the water at LaPerouse to snorkel.

Here's some nice table coral out by LaPerouse Pinnacle.

I saw a big green sea turtle while snorkeling today.

These are bluefin trevally. They can get up to about 25 pounds and like to follow people around while they snorkel. I don't know if they're just curious or think we'll scare up some food for them.

Brie and Kelly are putting temporary bands on the albatross chicks. They are starting to wander away from their nests a little, so we want to know which chick came from which nest in the plots that we monitor.

This frigatebird got hit by the plane propeller a few weeks ago. It looks almost like it got chopped in half, but I think only the tail feathers got knocked off. It flies around fine, but might be a little less maneuverable. You can look at my older posts for what a full tailed bird looks like (the one back in Nov. shows the tails nicely).

More Birds

2009-02-08T22:02:00.005-10:00

There are even more birds here this week. The sooty terns are landing in the afternoons and evenings, and making a lot of noise. We have a plane next week for a volunteer changeout, so I hope the birds don't stay on the runway until after that.

The weather was finally nice enough to get out and make sure everything was good on the other islands. We did a marine debris pickup on East island and brought back a full boat load of bottles, floats, shoes, toothbrushes, lighters, and various other plastic things. I probably should have taken a picture. I'll get one next time. There's no shortage of trash to pick up over there. We also stopped by La Perouse pinnacle and tried to do some snorkeling. The swells were pretty big so the visibility wasn't very good. We didn't stay long. But it was nice to get out and look around the atoll.

The sooty terns are crowding onto the runway.

This isn't the place to come if you don't like birds.

The albatross chicks are starting to be left on their own.

Here's a vagrant bird that showed up recently. It's a Glaucous-winged gull in it's first winter plumage. I hope it does better than the ducks do when they accidentally fly here.

I've been taking a lot of frigatebird pictures lately, since they are pretty interesting right now. This male (on the shrub) is displaying for the female, who checked him out for a couple of seconds, but I guess she thought she could do better and flew off.

Here's another picture of the facilities. This is our "library", also where we eat meals. We've got a lot of pretty random books here that people have left. It's similar to Midway's library, where you have to make sure the bookworms/termites haven't started reading them first.

Good Week

2009-02-01T21:27:00.005-10:00

This week went pretty smoothly. We did a lot of bird and nest counting and marking. We're still enjoying our new shipment of fresh vegetables. The weather has been a little windy and the ocean too rough to get out to the other islands recently, but we hope to get out to make sure everything is ok on the rest of the atoll as soon as we can. So this week was a good week for enjoying the fresh air and ocean view.

I thought I had posted a picture of actually landing on Tern island. Apparently I didn't. You can see a part of the pilots helment in case a bird comes through the windsheild.

The sooty terns are coming back by the thousands. There are big clouds of them above the island, and they are getting really loud. You can see why the pilots wear helmets.

A gray-backed tern is sitting on a rock. There's only a few of these around. They look the same as the sooty terns except what's gray on this bird is black on a sooty tern.

MMMM, fish and squid oil! This is a common sight around the island.

The frigatebirds are almost always puffed up now so they add a lot of color to the island.

This is what the kitchen looks like. This was a spaghetti night.

Another Interesting Week

2009-01-25T21:12:00.004-10:00

We had a pretty interesting week for Tern island. Biologically, we got done with our fourth and final albatross sweep where every nest is checked to see if birds are banded or not. On Monday, the first Laysan albatross chick hatched. They are starting to pop out everywhere now. The Sooty terns are flying over the island by the thousands, and every day more show up to fly around. They don't land, for the moment, but one of these days they'll all decide it's time to sit and pick nesting spots.

A few days ago we had a visit from a helicopter. It must have been military from a ship since we are kind of out of range for anyone else. They just flew around the atoll for an hour or so, then went back where they came from. I guess they just wanted to check out the atoll.

We also had a supply plane come in on Saturday. They meant to turn right around and head back to Honolulu, but they blew a tire from having to brake so fast on our short, bird-filled runway. So they got to stay the night, and we were happy to have them since they brought us mail and fresh food which we hadn't got since Dec. 4. We've been having a lot of canned stuff lately. Today, another plane flew in with some new wheels and a mechanic to change them. The pilot was Bob Justman, who flew here for many years. Today was his 663rd flight out here. He was pretty good at dodging the birds.

My big project for tomorrow is fixing the kitchen/common room lights. It was kind of cool making dinner by kerosene lantern light, but I think I'd rather have a little better light so I can at least get most of the ants and fruit flies out of my food.

Here's the first Laysan albatross chick.

This is the unknown helicopter flying off into the sunset.

This doesn't roll so well anymore.

Bob J. was showing us a picture similar to this from a few years ago, except his plane was the one with the flat.

This picture was from last week. Kelly is taking the turtle out of the net so we can put it back over the seawall. This isn't the same turtle as in my last week's post. This one is a little bit bigger, but it was in the same spot.

Albatrosses are Hatching

2009-01-18T21:45:00.004-10:00

Another busy week on Tern Island, of course it always is. The black-footed albatross chicks started hatching last Monday, which was a little earlier than expected. There aren't too many yet and the weather has been cool (high 60's, low 70's) and windy, so the parents aren't getting up to let us see exactly how many are hatching. The Laysan albatrosses are starting to poke holes in their eggs (pip), but aren't out yet.

The plane to Midway flew over today, so I got to chat with a couple of people on their way to Midway, like Matt (Midway Manager), Susan (Monument Supervisor), and Robyn (Regional Director). I don't know why, but for some reason that's more fun than chatting on the phone, even though it's hard to hear and we don't say much. We can't see the plane from down here because it's too small and high, but they can see us. I posted a picture of Tern from that plane on my Midway blog back in Sept. '07.

We ran out of fresh vegetables a few weeks ago, but we're expecting a plane this week with supplies and mail. The next plane after that is a month from now, so we should be able to almost make it until then.

This chick is right by the front door, so it will be easy to keep an eye on. The parent is shading it from the direct sun and talking to it so the chick knows it's voice when it comes back to feed it (I may anthropomorphize a little, but it's better than using technical terms).

We've had to rescue a couple of green sea turtles from behind the seawall this week. I found this turtle today in a pool and had to catch it and put it back out over the seawall. I had my underwater camera so I snapped a picture of it in the pool before I caught it. It was about 14" across. You can see a picture of where they get stuck on the Dec. 14 post.

The red-tailed tropicbirds are coming back. Last month we'd only see one here or there, but now there are about 100 flying around squawking in the afternoons.

A couple of endangered monk seals are sleeping on the beach while a Laysan albatross flies over.

There are a whole lot of these little black noddy chicks around now. This one is a neighbor in the same bush as the one from last week.

I haven't shown you many pictures of the facilities around here, so since I talked about getting food on the plane, I'll show you our food storage room. You can see we aren't in any danger of starving, even without this plane.

More Rain

2009-01-11T17:18:00.005-10:00

It's kind of been a weird week, weather wise. It's been either really nice or really bad. Not much in between. Yesterday, I spent the entire morning mopping up water that leaked through the roof and windows. We've had a few beautiful sunny days too. At least we weren't shoveling snow like some of you are doing.

There are a lot of chicks hatching right now. One red-tailed tropicbird has a chick, one white tern has a chick, and there are a lot of black noddy chicks hatching today. The black-footed albatross are about a week away from hatching and the Laysan albatrosses, about 2 or 3 weeks yet.

The nights have been beautiful for the most part too. The moon has been so bright, it's almost like daylight. I've got a couple pictures for you.

Here's the white tern parent hovering by its chick.

This black noddy chick is still hatching. It's back half is still in the shell. I couldn't get a good picture of that though.

This is the view from the roof a few nights ago just before midnight. I took a 30 second exposure, so it wasn't really this bright. The bright "star" in the sky is Venus.

This is looking north from the island. This picture looks really nice at full resolution, but that's too big to upload. If your screen has decent resolution, you can see the stars. This was another 30 second exposure. There was a turtle swimming around at the bottom of the picture, but since it's dark and moving, you can't tell at all.

Happy 2009

2009-01-04T19:03:00.003-10:00

The volunteers had another busy week with the birds. Every week they either have to read the band on every albatross on an egg. They switch weeks to do Black-footed one week and Laysans the next. It usually takes them about 3 or 4 full days to get that done. While they do that I usually take care of the admin stuff, learn some more about this place, inventory everything on the island, and fix whatever broke recently or needs fixing. This week it was water filters, the warehouse wall, the boats, covering a large pipe so no one falls in, and a some other random jobs.

Since we're out of the holiday season now and are going to be back to 6 days a week, we should be able to do quite a bit more around here. We got out snorkeling on New Year's Day, so that was nice. The current was really fast near the island though, so we really couldn't stop to look at things, but I got a couple of pictures. The white-tip sharks were there as usual. The girls counted 6 of them at once. I couldn't really count them becuase I couldn't tell if I was seeing new ones or the same 2 every time. At least we don't have to do counts of all the fish around here.

Here's a snorkel pic at sunset with some water drops on the lens.

This is an old Jeep that the Coast Guard (or the Navy????) dumped in the water when they were done with it

This black-footed albatross got a net caught on it. It probably had fish eggs attached to it, which these birds love. A few snips with the scissors took care of it, but the net had worn into the skin a little and was blocking it's throat a little too. It's doing fine now.

I haven't shown you a white tern since my Midway blog, so here's one.

I thought at first that the bird in back was a white tern, but it's actually a brown noddy that's almost albino. It's bill and eyes are dark though. It was born a couple of months ago so its about the same age as the bird in front. We never see albino or almost albino adults of any birds around here. We think that them being in the sun all the time does them in.

The male great frigatebirds are starting to practice attracting the females. They aren't quite ready to nest yet though.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-28T20:30:00.005-10:00

We completed our Christmas bird count for the Audubon Society this week. We counted 11,442 birds on this island of 16 species, 15 if you don't count the Laysan/Black-footed hybrid. It took about 4 1/2 hours. We were supposed to do the other islands also, but the weather was bad, so we didn't count them until yesterday. There were 454 birds on Trig Island, 3893 birds on East Island, and 82 on La Perouse Pinnacle (including the peregrine). There would have been a couple thousand more if we had counted earlier in the morning and later in the evening when the birds aren't out feeding. You'll probably end up seeing most of these species on my blog at some time.

Our Christmas was uneventful, but we had a nice ham meal. I don't know what to do with all these days off over the holidays, so I end up doing a few projects. That's the trouble with living in your office.

The volunteers are about to start the bird count on a Tern Island winter day.

I took some pictures today of a young frigate bird playing with a stick. They like to pick things up, chase each other around, and drop things so they can catch them again. When the Sooty terns are here, many times they'll pick up a small chick and play with them too. The chicks don't make it though.

Apparently this monk seal couldn't find a comfortable spot on the beach.

I tried to figure out what these little eels were. The best I could come up with are that they are young conger eels. Feel free to correct me if you know what they are. There were thousands of them washed up on the Trig Island beach.

Bad Weather & Bird Counts

2008-12-21T20:17:00.006-10:00

We've been having some more heavy wind and rain this week. We've been mopping up the water from the leaks in the barracks for the last few days, and our internet and phones were out for a couple days. The satellite signal can't make it through the thick clouds. Again, what can you expect on a remote island. I'd still rather have this than the below zero weather back in North Dakota, and I still love it here! Some of the albatross nests were flooded, but as long as they stay on the egg, they should be ok. One good thing is that all 5 of our water tanks are completely full.

We are doing the Christmas bird count for the Audubon Society this week. That will be a big project since we are supposed to count every bird of every species on the entire atoll in one day, and there are only 6 of us. Last year there were about 12,000 birds on this island alone. There will probably be another couple thousand on East Island. It will be really difficult to count the birds at LaPerouse Pinnacle since we can't get on it, but we'll try to count them from the boat.

This is what our runway looks like after a couple weeks of rainy weather and no time to scrape the weeds off. Needless to say, I've got some work to do before our plane comes in a few weeks.

We hope to see the bird with the orange bill on our bird count. It is a Nazca booby (the one in front is a masked booby). Their normal range is the Eastern Pacific, especially the Galapagos Islands. They were considered a subspecies of the masked booby, but now are considered separate. This one was here last year, but there is only one, so it probably won't be nesting anytime soon here.

Here's a closeup of a masked booby.

The red-tailed tropicbirds are starting to come back now too.

Here's a little crab that was wandering around in the catchment pad area. It was about 6 inches wide.

I spotted a few Spotted eagle rays as I went around the island on my entrapment walk this morning.

Bad Weather and Marine Debris

2008-12-14T17:04:00.004-10:00

This week was pretty busy. I'm trying to learn where everything is and its taking a while. The volunteers were counting all of the Black-footed albatross nests and banding all of the nesting birds. It took most of the week.

We had some bad weather with big surf. The waves washed about a quarter of the way across the island in some spots. A lot of nests were washed away, bushes uprooted, and rocks thrown around and we lost most of East Beach. It was over 100 yards long, but now it's just a little sand slope. We also took a trip to Trig island and East Island. All of the nests on trig island got washed away (about 250). It looks like the birds were all ok. They'll just have to try again next year. About 1/4 of Trig island got washed away too. Now it's 2 separate islands. That happens quite often in the winter I guess. Hawaii got the worst of it though, they had mudslides and flooding everywhere.

East island was interesting. There was a lot of marine debris to pick up. We brought a lot back on the boats, but there's still a bunch over there. We only found one glass fishing float, the rest was the same old junk, like nets, bottles, plastic fishing floats, nets, ropes, etc.

This week will be more of the same, except this week it will be counting and banding Laysan albatrosses.

This is East Beach a few weeks ago.

This is East Beach now.

This is East Island. The big pole has a camera to monitor turtle nesting. There is a transmitter also so we can check the island from here.

We had to rescue a green sea turtle that was stuck here in the shallow water behind the seawall. They sometimes are feeding near the seawall when a wave will push them through the holes. They usually can't get back out, so we have to put them back out. There have been 3 stuck in the last week. One was about 80 pounds, and was pretty hard to catch, but we got it out. The others were smaller. Sooner or later the seawall will get repaired, when there's enough money for that project.

While we were boating, we saw this contraption. We thought it was trash and were going to pick it up. It says on it that it's "providing valuable ocean research data" and not to remove it from the water. I looked it up on the internet, and they attach these things to ghost nets (abandoned fishing nets) to track their movements. They actually put their GPS information online so you can see exactly where they are, but this serial number wasn't being tracked on their website (oceantrekresearch.com). I hope it doesn't get stuck on our reef or tangle any animals.

Snorkeling Day

2008-12-07T20:51:00.004-10:00

This week the manager left and so I'll be in charge until March. There are 6 of us here now, 5 1/2 volunteers and me. The 1/2 volunteer is working on satellite tagging albatross the rest of the time (we did that last year on Midway and I showed some pictures of it on my Midway blog). I'm hoping it won't be too crazy around here. So far we've had a few electrical problems, water problems, and boat problems. But what can you expect on a remote island?

We work 6 days a week and only get Sundays off, so today a few of us went snorkeling since it was finally a fairly calm day. We saw the usual suspects; turtles, sharks, eels, and lots of other fish.

This is how the waves were looking for the last week or so. It's great to look at, but not that great for snorkeling or boating. Today we went snorkeling from the northeast corner of the island, along the whole north side (which is the calmer area in this picture), and got out at the boat ramp on the southwest corner of the island.

This is a whitemouth moray eel. They are fairly common in Hawaiian waters.

This is a gold-ring surgeonfish (aka: kole tang, spotted surgeonfish), and in the background you can see part of an "old woman wrasse". Don't ask me where that name came from?

Here is a convict tang (aka convict surgeonfish), a yellowtail coris, and a raccoon butterfly fish. You can probably guess which one is which. The yellowtail coris is one of my favorites. This picture doesn't do all the colors justice.

Here are two whitetip reef sharks. The third one was off to the left and didn't fit in the picture.

Happy Late Thanksgiving

2008-11-30T17:33:00.004-10:00

We had the usual Thanksgiving feast out here, including a 20 lb. turkey. We're still on leftovers, but now we're only down to turkey soup.

The day before that, we took a boat trip to Trig island to count the albatross nests and pick up marine debris. There are only a couple little portulaca plants on that island since it gets washed over fairly often. The birds are nesting on the high spot so I hope they'll make it there. The main reason we went is so I could find the way to get there, since when Dave leaves next week, I'll be left in charge. There's a small opening in the reef with little clearance, so it'll take some practice to not scrape anything.

After Trig Island, we went to LaPerouse Pinnacle to check which bird species are present. The peregrine falcon was there and no blue noddies, so it will probably take them a couple years to get going there again. There are also a lot of Brown boobies, White terns, and Great frigatebirds. The volunteers got to snorkel there and it looked like a great spot. It's from 10-20 ft. deep right around there so the coral and fish are a lot different than near Tern. I only got to look in the water next to the boat since we don't anchor there and someone has to drive.

This is our dining area. We had our T-dinner buffet style so that's why it looks skimpy.

This is Trig island. Lots of sand and a few birds. The picture is a little washed out because it's my little waterproof point and shoot instead of my nice camera.

LaPerouse Pinnacle up close.

It's not very wide. For being 120 ft. tall.

Here's the only Laysan/Blackfooted albatross hybrid on the island. It doesn't have any better luck with mates than the ones on Midway did.

Birds and Sharks

2008-11-23T18:57:00.007-10:00

The weather here has been nice. I went snorkeling a couple of days ago. It's a lot like Midway, but a lot more sharks. I saw 5 of them. A gray reef shark and a bunch of white-tipped reef sharks. I was busy learning again too. We tried to take the boats out so I could learn the reefs, but they were acting up, so we'll have to look at them this week. There are also a couple of fish that I haven't seen before, like Potter's angelfish and Yellow tailed coris. They are both really colorful.

There are a lot of Black-footed albatross nests now, and a few Laysan albatross nests. The island is starting to fill up with them. The Black noddies are also laying eggs right now.

Things are going fairly smoothly around here, and I'm getting more comfortable with the cooking. Last night I made sesame chicken that I think turned out pretty tasty. On Thanksgiving we'll all do the cooking and cleaning.

This is the gray reef shark that was following me. It's about 6 ft. long, so it's bigger than the other ones I've seen. It was following pretty closely which was a little unnerving. I heard there is one gray reef shark that doesn't like people swimming through his area, so when you see him getting mad, you're supposed to swim quickly out of there. This one wasn't doing any posturing, so I wasn't too worried.

This is our one coconut tree that I told you I'd show you. The others are heliotrope (Tournefortia) trees. That one in the back is the biggest one on the island and the rest are pretty much just bushes.

This is LaPerouse Pinnacle. It's the last remaining part of the original island. It's still 120 feet tall. This is where the peregrine was hanging out and where the blue noddies used to live.

These are some Blue noddies on Nihoa. Here's are Brown and Black noddies for comparison.

Brown noddy.

Black Noddy. It normally looks more black than this, but the sun was really bright.

Since I showed you the noddies from Nihoa, here's another bird I saw there. This is a Nihoa finch in a native popolo plant (Solanum nelsonii). They are endemic to Nihoa. They are endangered since they are found nowhere else.

Almost Week 2

2008-11-16T18:51:00.003-10:00

It's been a windy, rainy week. Since there's only 1 scrawny coconut tree on the island, there isn't much to stop the wind. The birds like it though. The fledglings are learning quickly how to lift off and land.

I've been pretty busy learning the ropes. The hardest part is trying to find things. I've had to do a few minor repairs and it's taken me far longer to find the tools than to do the work.

There are a couple of vagrant birds hanging around. One is a female Northern pintail duck (I haven't got a picture yet) that will probably stay around for the winter and fatten up for spring. There is also a peregrine falcon which I saw being chased by the white terns. The white terns seem to be the only ones that try to chase away birds of prey on these islands. The peregrine has pretty much taken care of the population of blue noddies (formerly called blue-gray noddies) that nest on La Perouse Pinnacle. Last time anyone went out there they found only 1. Next week I'll give you a picture of the coconut tree, La Perouse Pinnacle, and some blue noddies on Nihoa.

I didn't cook ramen for everyone's meal last week. I kept it fairly simple though until I learn my way around the pantry and cupboards a little better. I just made spaghetti with sauce from a jar (and a couple extra veggies and spices). Most people do it up a little more than that. So far the food has been really good. Right now we are on a 6 day rotation (supper only) and Sundays we fend for ourselves. We have 7 people, but our IT person who's here for a week, doesn't have to cook. She's been making good deserts anyway.

This is the sign greeting people from the plane. It's posted up on our tractor shed. It should really have flip numbers since the population fluctuates a little.

The masked boobies and brown noddy fledglings like to sit on the runway.

The frigate birds like windy days. Here's two young ones.
Our seawall is in bad shape so one of our daily projects, which we also take turns doing, is called the entrapment walk. We just look in all these spaces around the island to make sure no birds, turtles, or seals are stuck in there. It takes about 45 minutes to walk around the island.

I'm Here

2008-11-11T21:30:00.002-10:00

After about 10 weeks I finally made it to Tern Island! It’s a lot like Midway but much smaller, no trees (or bowling alley), and we have to take turns cooking. Right now there are 6 of us here in rotation so I’ll get my first chance to cook for the group on Friday. The food pantry is stocked pretty well but I think I’ll try something easy. There’s about a 2 year supply of ramen packages so maybe I’ll just boil some of those up.

The room I moved into needs some work. I’ve got to evict about 20 brown widow spiders (I heard they aren’t quite as poisonous as black widows). I’ll also need to try to coax the roaches into someone else’s room. We also don’t have a clothes dryer so we use a line outside. You just have to ignore the white stains that you get on everything from the birds.

Today was a holiday so I got a chance to snorkel off the east side of the island. The fish and coral are pretty much the same as at Midway, but the current is a lot stronger since the reef doesn’t surround the whole atoll like it does at Midway.

I’ll probably be here until about March before I get some time off the island. It looks like it will be busy around here, but I think I’ll love it.

This is the plane we take. We have to fly about 40 min. from Honolulu to Kauai, top off the fuel, then fly about 2 and a half hours to Tern. It can only take 720 lbs. so that's usually only about 3 people and gear.

This used to be a tennis court for the Coast Guard station that was here. Now it catches our water for the barracks. It only runs through 2 filters and a UV light, so it smells a little weird. We use a lot of tea/Kool-aid/Crystal Light/Tang etc. mixes.

One of the cool things is that you get to see endangered species through the window. A Hawaiian Monk seal is sleeping about 20 feet away from the barracks.

This is the view from the southeast corner of the island to the northeast corner. As you can see, it's not that big! A few Black-footed albatross are sitting at the end of the runway.

Quick Trip to Tern

2008-11-03T14:59:00.006-10:00

Ok, here is the new blog! Thanks for waiting. By the way, I won't be doing this daily because it takes a lot of time, so maybe once a week or so. We'll see.

I've been in Honolulu for about 2 months waiting to get out to Tern Island, and I finally got a chance to get out there last week for a day. The Kahana (supply ship) was bringing up a work crew and I can't be there permanently until Nov. 10th, so I took a ride up. On the way up we stopped by Nihoa, the first island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. People need special permission to go onto the island so it's really special to get there. The crew we dropped off had to check on the endangered/endemic Nihoa finches and Nihoa Millerbirds. I got a chance go on the island for about 20 minutes. There was a native Hawaiian settlement there up through the 1700's so there are ruins of terraces and other interesting archeological items. Nihoa is important in Hawaiian culture so a cultural monitor accompanies the groups that go to Nihoa to perform a spiritual ceremony and make sure that things are not disturbed.

Tern island is small. It's only about 30 acres, we catch rain for our drinking water, and we use mostly solar power (generator backup). We do have internet, but no TV. I'm just giving you a brief preview and you'll get more of the story on my later posts when I actually get out there.

Here's a picture I took of the Kahana at Midway. For those of you who watch "Lost", it is the ship that got blown up in season 4. It was a 6 day trip to Tern and back. Great food by the way!

A view of Nihoa from the southwest.

Looking east down the Tern Island runway. The barracks are on the right.

As you can see, the barracks are right on the water, so it's a nice view for the volunteers (my room looks at the other barracks rooms).