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.

Whales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.