No Pics this time

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

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

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

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.