Spring Cleaning

Today my project was to clean out some of the old termite infested furniture from our storage building. About half of our excess dressers, tables, and chairs are garbage because of termites or mildew. It' s interesting going through 30 years of stuff.


I don't know if you read John's comments about the seawall from 2 days ago or not, but I said the seawall was to prevent erosion. I was oversimplifying things a little. Basically, they put a seawall around the entire eastern part of the island and filled it in with coral and anything else that they could. Our whole harbor and boat pier area are just added land. The island was doubled in size. They dredged out the atoll and also brought in a lot of topsoil and fill from all over the pacific to make Sand Island larger. That's why we have fire ants and centipedes and most of our other invasive bugs here. Thanks John for your comments and anyone else who's been here should feel free to make comments about the history here, or anything else that you want.





These pictures are of our old furniture storage area. This building used to be the commissary, now it's just a place to store old non-functional appliances and non-useful furniture. It will probably take a few weeks of extra time to sort out the worthless stuff. I don't know what we'll do with it, but at least we'll organize a little.

Nice Day

It was a nice day today. Mostly sunny and not too hot. I finally got a chance to use the backhoe today. There was a big net on the west beach that needed to be removed. It was at least a few hundred pounds with all the sand sticking to it. There was a young seal sleeping on it a few days ago so we wanted to make sure that it wont get stuck in it.

I also cut down 140 little ironwood saplings that were growing by the beach. I just used branch cutters since most of them were less than 2" diameter. I only got about 1/4 of them done. It's really tough to keep up with them.

Tonight I think I'll play volleyball since I didn't on Wednesday. At least we don't have to worry about the turtles hatching and coming to the lights anymore.

This is an old seawall near the fuel pier. It was put there to stop erosion.

There's a lot of verbesina to get rid of here.

Turtle Nest

It's been 90 days since the turtle nest was found and we never saw any turtles, so today we dug it up because it's past the time that they should have hatched. We didn't know if there'd be anything in there since there's never been a turtle nest recorded on Sand Island. We found 83 hatched eggs and 6 unhatched eggs. Most of the unhatched eggs were unfertilized but 1 had a baby turtle that didn't make it. It looks like they hatched a couple of weeks ago but we didn't see the tracks so it was probably one night when it rained. Very few turtles survive to adulthood, so out of the 83 we'll be lucky to even get one that makes it to breeding age. Lots of turtles hang out here but they usually nest at French Frigate Shoals.

Here's Greg digging for the eggs. They were about 3 ft. deep so the little turtles have a tough time digging their way out.

Here's Barry Christenson counting the hatched eggs.

I just put this picture up since there was turtle news today.

Chainsaw Thursday

I didn't end up playing volleyball last night since it rained, but I guess some people went out. I'll go next time. This afternoon I got quite a few trees cut down from the right side of that picture yesterday. The ducks just sat there while I sawed.

There's really not much going on right now to tell you about, so I'll just post a couple of pictures.

I don't think I've shown you one of these birds yet. This is a Ruddy Turnstone. They are shorebirds that come here for the winter. They breed somewhere else. There are hundreds of them around. There's a few other winter visitors right now like 11 northern pintail ducks, a green-winged teal, some wandering tattlers, pharalopes and a couple other birds. The new ducks probably won't stay too long.

I took this picture from the fuel pier a few weeks ago. That's Eastern Island in the background.

Rainy Wednesday

I didn't do any spraying today since it was windy and rainy today, but I did do some mowing on the south side of the runway. That's where most of the black-footed albatross nest. Greg and I were just looking for mowing hazards today and clearing around them so next time it will be easier.

That's about all that went on today. I don't know if there'll be volleyball tonight or not due to the rain so I might just have to take it easy tonight.

This is a Battle of Midway memorial listing the U.S. commanders and ships. It also has a map of the battle on there. It's also the area we've been mowing and spraying lately, that's why you can't see any verbesina.

This is where we've been doing our chainsawing. You might think it looks nicer with the trees there, but it's better to have it surrounded by natural vegetation. If these trees were much bigger it would be too large of a project.

Fire Training

Today the Fire Dept. and airport guys went out for training. They put out a fire in a simulated crashed airplane (a bunch of palates laid out like an airplane). They put it out so quickly that I didn't get any good pictures of the flames. So Greg and I watched that between spraying sessions today.

The mowing was slow today because we were in an area with a little duckling that hides in the verbesina there. The mother has a radio transmitter so Jimmy came out and made sure we were no where near those ducks. Greg and Jimmy walked in front of the tractor and poked in the weeds to make sure there were no other ducks there (there weren't). I got a few more pictures today since it was sunny.

Here are the airport people putting out the fire in the palates.

We're getting a lot of nesting area cleared. That building in the distance is the communication building that you saw last week, and the area on the left is where some ducklings like to hide so there's still verbesina there.

This is a Wedge-Tailed Shearwater chick in it's burrow. This is one reason it's really hard to mow (and spray). The petrels dig even more holes than the shearwaters. In sandy areas there are usually burrows every couple of feet.

This is an adult Wedgie.

That one had a little nicer burrow. This is an old underground storage bunker by the runway. There were about 8 wedgie chicks in there last time I checked.

Another NPR Story

There was another NPR story about Midway today. This time it was about all the plastic that the birds bring here and the marine debris that washes up. Here's the link if you want to read or listen to the story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14859155


I did some mowing today and cleaned up the chainsaws to use this week. It was cloudy most of the day today and it rained a little tonight, but I managed to take a few pictures after work. I'll show you what I've mowed when it's sunny out.

This brown noddy chick fell out of a tree so it's wandering around on the ground. It's parents were nearby so it still should get fed.

This white tern chick was in the tree above the noddy chick.

The sunset is always good when it's a little cloudy.