Happy Halloween

We have a few more black-footed albatrosses are hanging around, and 2 Laysan albatrosses just showed up today.  We are just about done with all of our projects that have to be done before the birds come back en masse. Speaking of that, our lead paint remediation project is going well.  The workers will be able to work for only about 2 more weeks before there are too many albatrosses around.

You may have also heard that a lot of the tsunami debris from Japan is making its way toward Midway and may be here sometime this winter.  There are a lot of articles about it, but here's a link to a good one:  http://news.discovery.com/earth/tsunami-debris-floating-fast-towards-hawaii-111025.html

This was the only Black-footed albatross I saw on Eastern Island last week.

 This is one of the early Laysan albatrosses.   

 I strung some new cable to our remote cameras on Eastern Island.  This camera monitors the ducks at the Monument seep. 

 Anthony, Leann, and Anette are weeding the Short-tailed albatross plot so we can put the decoys in.

 We haven't seen the Short-tailed albatrosses yet this season, but the decoys are freshly painted and enough of the verbesina is gone to allow easy access for the birds.

Clyde and Lynn from NOAA came out to do some work on the tide station.  They gave a tour of their gear and a short presentation.  I learned a couple of new things.

 As I posted last week, Sak is leaving the island after almost 29 years.  This is the line of people saying goodbye to him.

We had a Halloween party last night at Capt Brooks' Tavern. 

Patty got rid of some expired light sticks for her costume.

Lead Paint Work & Retirement Party

We should be seeing the albatrosses coming back any day now.  I think I forgot to mention it, but the first Black-footed albatross was seen over a week ago, but didn't stick around long enough for anyone to get photos.  I'm guessing that some will be back by next blog.
 
The lead paint work is going along well.  The buildings are being treated and the ground is being covered by shade cloth so that the albatrosses won't nest in those areas with the most lead paint.  That should save a lot of chicks from dying of lead poisoning. 

We also had a retirement party last night for Sak Phosri.  He has worked on Midway for almost 29 years.  We've never heard of anyone else being here for that long anytime in Midway's history.  We'll lose a lot of island knowledge when he leaves. 

 This is the old machine shop.  The shade cloth will keep the birds from nesting here while the work is going on. 

 Remediation of the old torpedo building (or parachute building) is almost complete.

 A lot of people wonder where we get our drinking water.  Well, this is it.  This is our rain catchment area next to the runway.  The ducks like it a lot.

 This is some nice marine debris artwork made by Susan Scott in Honolulu.  She writes a weekly column for the Honolulu Star Advertiser as well.  The birds are all old cigarette lighters and the blue and green areas are small plastic pieces that washed up or that albatrosses brought back to feed to their chicks.

 This is the other "Lighter art" piece that Susan donated.  Thanks, Susan!

 We had a full house at the All Hands Club for Sak's retirement party.

Here's the guest of honor, in the dark shirt, as well as Toy, Kamwang, Prajim, and Anthony.

Someone had a lifesize photo of Sak made for everyone to take photos with.  The golf bag, which everyone signed, was a retirement gift from the island.  The cutout will stay on Midway, but Sak will take the golf bag. 

Duck Bands and Kahana

The Kahana showed up this week and brought some supplies for the lead paint remediation.  The plane also brought 16 people up for that project and they'll be here for 5 weeks.  They are a good bunch of guys and seem like they're liking Midway so far. The Chugach band played last night at the All Hands Club, but had to quit early due to electrical problems.  It's been a while since they played since a few of the band members were off island for a while.

Michelle and Chris have been catching a lot of ducks and replacing or putting on new bands.  We've already been spotting the new ones in the field and they are much easier to read.

People have been seeing a Northern harrier (formerly known as a Marsh hawk) around the island.  It's apparently really easy to spot because there's normally a big flock of white terns or noddies harassing it.  I haven't seen it yet, but I'll try to get a photo of it for positive ID.  I hope it leaves before it eats too many birds.

 

We've been getting a lot of rain this week, and it's not quite as warm.  But it's still beautiful.

 This duck has a new band.  You can see the 9 pretty easily.

 The Kahana brought fuel and the lead paint supplies.  And stayed about 2 days. 

 The white tern chick in my yard finally left yesterday.  It's been able to fly for over a month, but hung around anyway.  It's a nice bird, so I hope it comes back to visit now and then.

We did a sunset duck survey over on Eastern Island last night.  The sunset wasn't the most colorful, but it was nice watching it on the really smooth boat ride back to Sand Island, which you can see on the horizon of this picture. 

A Day Late

I decided to wait a day for my blog, since I wanted to get a few more photos and it was a holiday.

This week we have some new people on island.  We have some archeologists here to look around some of our buildings that are going to have lead paint remediation around them.  Since lead paint has been peeling off of buildings since they put the cable houses here in 1903, they'll have to remediate a lot of the soil around those buildings.  The archeologists are just making sure that historical artifacts are preserved before the work is done. 

Michelle and Chris with the USGS, came to band the Laysan ducks.  Many of the bands put on a few years ago, aren't readable anymore.  Hopefully, they'll change out most of those old ones and band a lot of our younger ducks so we can get a better idea of our duck health and population.

Other than that, it's been hot for October.  It made digging the well on Eastern Island a bit more difficult, but since I'm not out in the field all day, I kind of like it that way.   

 Here's the Gulfstream IIB bringing our mail (and people and supplies).

 This is one of the cable houses that the archeologists are digging around.  I don't think they've found too much interesting stuff yet.

 This Laysan duck was standing just outside the garage on Friday, so I took some photos of his band.  This band actually started out green with white letters.  Now, it's just white.  I hope Michelle finds him again to reband him.

 We went back to finish the well on Eastern Island.  We didn't get it as deep as we wanted, because the sand kept caving in, but hopefully it's deep enough.

 Done!  (Except for putting in the pump, running the hose, putting up the solar panels, and all that.)

This big plastic thing will be a little duck pond.  We'll have a rain catching roof above it to keep it full of water.  These "guzzlers" are a lot less likely to have botulism problems.  We'll be using the new well to fill that big tank behind.

 I was out riding around today and saw some White-tailed tropicbirds flying around the orchard.  We only have a few of these around and the only way I notice them, apart from all of the other thousands of white birds that fly around, is to hear them.  They sound almost like a Red-tailed tropicbird, but different enough to notice. 

They are really pretty birds.  They nest in the ironwood trees, unlike the red-tailed tropicbirds, that nest on the ground.

Nice Week

It was a beautiful week.  I spent most of the week catching up on emails and finding out what went on while I was gone.  The volunteers have been busy with the duck surveys, pulling weeds and planting some native plants around the island.  The albatrosses won't be back for a couple more weeks, so we're still trying to do projects that are easier when you don't have over a million birds around. 

Since it was a beautiful day yesterday, we went out to Reef Hotel for a snorkel trip.  The dolphins came and played around the boat for a bit.  So it was another usual day.

John and Eamon are digging a freshwater well on Eastern Island.  We'll use the water for the verbesina removal project that we'll have going on there for the next 4 years.  We dug all afternoon, and although we got to the water pretty quickly, we have to go a lot deeper to make the solar pump effective.

We had a crew out here for many months painting these water tanks by the runway.  They couldn't work on rainy or windy days, so it took a long time.

 I didn't get a lot of great snorkeling pictures yesterday, but it was nice water and there were quite a few fish around.  This is an Oval butterflyfish and a Spectacled Parrotfish.

Here's another Spectacled parrotfish.  The fish make a lot of noise when they chomp on the coral.  You can hear it very well underwater.  These fish are also responsible for making a lot of the sand in the atoll by crushing up the coral that they eat.

This Laysan duck got its head stuck in a plastic ring from a bottlecap a while back.  This happens quite a few times a year.  We caught this one and got the ring off. 

Finally Back Again

Ok, I think that was my last vacation for the year.  It wasn't much of a vacation in Virginia.  I had to help Dasha move from our apartment to a house and just in time for Hurricane Irene.  It wasn't too bad in Alexandria, but our power went out, and the sump pump didn't work so we had to scoop out hundreds of gallons of water from the basement by hand.  Luckily, the power came back on just as it was about to overflow onto the floor.  At least I had a great vacation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.  I've included a few photos from there too. 

A lot has been going on here while I was gone.  The Kahana brought our supplies and the US Coast Guard ship Kukui came to do some work here and at Kure Atoll.  We also had a Coast Guard C-130 come about an hour after our plane came to pick up some of the Coast Guard personnel and a construction crew from Kure.  I've made it through a few hundred emails already and should be caught up in only another week or two, so if anyone reading this is expecting a reply from me, I'll probably be getting to it soon.  Alright, time for some photos. 

 I got to ride out on the new airplane.  Our flight contractor got a G-IIB.  It's almost the same as the last plane, but a little more headroom and the seating setup is a bit better. 

This plane flies a lot higher than the old G-I.  You can barely see French Frigate Shoals in this picture.  It's fairly small from 45,000 feet.  You can see that the atmosphere is pretty thin up there too.  You can maybe see it a bit better if you double click on the photo.

 This is part of Pearl & Hermes Atoll.  The reef pattern is pretty cool.  We didn't see Laysan or Lisianski this time, but we did see Nihoa, FFS, Gardner Pinnacles, and P&H.  I didn't get clear photos of Nihoa and Gardner due to the double windows on the plane.

There isn't much to see here, but this is Sand Island at Midway as we are getting ready to land.  It is pretty small, isn't it?

Now for some vacation photos.  Of course, I took a couple thousand, so here are just a few representative shots.

 These mountains are called the High Tatras in northern Slovakia.  We spent a week there.

 The hiking was wonderful.  It was really surprising how many people were up there, but I can see why because it is really beautiful.

 The mountain in the background is called Lomnicky stit. It looks a lot higher than 8,643 ft (2634 m), but the level of the surrounding land is not as high as it is in the Rocky Mountains.  There is a little gondola lift to the top.

 This is my brother-in-law, Tomas, taking a photo from the overlook on top of Lomnicky stit.  It's a pretty long drop from there.  It was clear down below, but there were some clouds up there the day we went.  It snowed up there 4 days later.

 This was our hotel for the week, the Grand Hotel Praha. 

 This was the view from our hotel room. 

 One interesting thing about the Czech Republic is how many of the hilltops have castles on them.  This castle is called Hazmburg.

 I'm not sure of the story behind these castle ruins, but it was probably nice five or six hundred years ago.

 This is the old town square in Dasha's hometown of Teplice.  There are some hot springs here that were said to be discovered in 762 A.D. Beethoven worked on some of his symphonies here while getting treatment in the spa. 

I of course had to go check out a soccer game in Teplice.  The stadium may look familiar if you saw the last "Pink Panther" movie.  I sat in the hooligan section for the first half, but moved for a better seat in the second half.  When you go with the rough crowd, you have to stand the whole time, and it's not quite the same when you don't understand the Czech taunts.

New Volunteers

We lost our extra volunteers this week.  They went back to Honolulu on Thursday along with two of our long term volunteers, David and Eryn.  They got a lot of native plants planted and weeds pulled.  We did get a new group in and it was nice of Amelia to stay to help train Anthony, Eamon, and Dani.  They've had to learn quickly about botulism and Laysan ducks.  We've had a few sick ones this week.  

I'll be flying out on the next plane, and coming back 3 1/2 weeks later.  I've had a lot of leave time to burn up this year thanks to spending 9 1/2 months on Tern Island last year.  I'll try to do a blog when I get back, or maybe I can do an entry while I'm in the Czech Republic. 

Tyler and Nikki are cutting back some of the naupaka in front of the FWS office.

There is a lot of grounding wire all over Eastern Island.  This brown noddy and chick don't seem to mind.

I haven't had a sunset picture for a while, and the colors were nice the other evening, so here is one.

The water was pretty cloudy out near the reef last week.  You can barely see the monk seal in this picture.

If I mess with the brightness and contrast, you can see it a little better.

The water was a lot clearer 2 weeks ago when I took this picture of some teardrop butterflyfish, threadfin butterflyfish, a moorish idol, a saddle wrasse, and a female spectacled parrotfish.