Tern Island - Population: 5

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.