New Volunteers

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.