Getting Ready

We're busy here on island getting ready for the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.  It won't be as large of a celebration as the 65th anniversary, but we'll be having a few veterans of the battle out here, as well as a special plane bringing out other guests for the day.  As far as other things going on around here, we have a few seal pups on the beaches around here, some Laysan ducklings running around, a lot of nesting birds with chicks, and some good weather.

Jennifer, Peter, and Christine are cleaning up the memorial for Memorial Day and for the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.

This is the finished product of the picture I showed you last week.

Albatross fledging season is getting close, so the tiger sharks are starting to become a lot more common.  People have been seeing them in the harbor quite frequently and I saw this one a few days ago on the way back from Eastern Island.  It looked about 8-9 ft long.

The red-footed booby chicks have hatched.

Here's a Red-tailed tropicbird flying by.  I took some pictures of the White-tailed tropicbirds too, but they weren't so great.

We started a volleyball league.  We haven't been playing much at all for the last year.  We're only playing for 3 weeks, but it's better than nothing.

Visitor Group

We had another good visitor group out here this week.  It's an interesting class at the University of Hawaii-Hilo.  It's a marine biology class but with a strong emphasis on native Hawaiian culture.  Basically, they are learning to use cultural knowledge and observations in addition to the things that they learn in class or books.  They've been getting up to start the day with a chant at sunrise, and also end the day with a chant at sunset.  They also had individual projects and gave presentations last night.

We missed out on the solar eclipse today.  I guess you had to be further north to catch it. 

The 70th anniversary of the Battle of Midway is coming up in a couple of weeks so we're keeping pretty busy getting ready for that.  It won't be a large celebration, but we will have some veterans of the battle coming out.

Here's an updated photo of the Short-tailed albatross chick on Eastern Island.  It will probably only be around for a few more weeks.  It looks a lot like the Black-footed albatross chick behind it, but quite a bit bigger.

 You can tell it's getting warm again, because most of the adult albatross are going for the shade.

 Here's another shady spot for the albatross.  A lot of the chicks stay where they are and don't go to the shade.

A Masked booby is sitting on the pier on Eastern Island.

 A squid washed up on the beach.  It was about 18" long and was the biggest one I've seen washed up.

 This was the old Commanding Officer's desk from the Navy days.  It was in the abandoned hangar and the termites started getting to it, so it was taken out, refinished, and now will be in the Refuge Manager's office.  I'm glad to see it getting use.

The UH Hilo group is painting the FWS visitor center.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom, and to all the other mothers who read this too!  I hope no one minds that I'm always a day behind on my holidays.  I guess that's one of the negatives about being in the last time zone

It's been beautiful this week so it finally dried out.  The sun was out, it wasn't too hot, and there was hardly any wind.  The volunteers have been keeping busy with the albatross chick banding, and Ive been keeping busy on the computer.  I found a few minutes to get out and see some things though.  I'll explain more in the photo captions.

This is one of our Black-footed albatross plots.  The volunteers have banded pretty much all of the black-footed albatross chicks, but have quite a few Laysan chicks to go.

 Here's an adult black-footed albatross.  It wasn't doing anything too exciting, but hte light was kind of nice.

There are a lot of white terns putting eggs everywhere.  This one found some old bedframes in the Ski Warehouse to lay it's egg.

This is the white tern chick that I showed you a couple of weeks ago under its parent.  It looks like it's still doing ok.

 It was too nice of a day to pass up a boat trip today.  The water was about as flat as it gets.  This is a marker that ships use to align themselves to make it through the channel cut in the coral.  The dark spot on the right side of the picture is a spotted eagle ray.  We saw a few of them today.  We also saw a manta ray, which I got a few underwater pictures of, but they were a little far away.

 This is the USS Macaw (ASR-11).  Today was the first time I had a chance to swim down and see it.  There's a really interesting story to this wreck.  It was a submarine rescue ship which tried to rescue the submarine USS Flier (SS-250), which had run aground in bad weather.  It ran aground too.  The weather was terrible and 5 sailors died during the weeks that it was grounded. They ended up having to use explosives to demolish the ship to clear the channel.  This bow section is relatively intact, but the rest of the ship is strewn all over the bottom.  Here are some quick links to some photos and accounts. 
http://www.ussmacaw.org/
http://www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/maritime/macaw.html
  

 I checked out a few new spots today.  There were a lot of whitebar surgeonfish and convict tangs following me around.

 The yellow tangs really brighten things up.

 The dolphins came to check out the boat, as usual.  I got a couple of pictures by putting my camera over the side.

I was going really slow, so the dolphins were swimming only a foot or two in front of the bow.

Back to work

I'm back on Midway after a nice time off in the Washington D.C. area.  It's been raining most of the time since I've been back which has caused some flooding in the old parade field and some of the seeps.  Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon pulling out birds that were flooded.  A lot of them could get to high ground by themselves, but a lot of them couldn't, especially the little Bonin petrel chicks that got flooded out of their burrows. I didn't take too many photos this week since I've been in the office catching up on emails and paperwork, just some of the wet birds.

 A view of Waikiki from the plane on my way back to Midway.

 The parade field got flooded.  It hasn't flooded this bad in years.

This is the road going to the old hangar.

 A lot of the birds climbed to high ground, but some of them stayed at their nests.

A few of the birds were climbing on the other ones to get out of the water.

 A lot of the Bonin petrel chicks were floating at the burrow entrances.  There were a lot of drowned birds too.

 I scooped out a couple hundred chicks and put them on dry ground.  Most of them wouldn't have made it if I had left them in the water.  The parents should still be able to find the chicks.

 I also moved a hundred or so albatross chicks to higher ground.  They'll be able to walk back to their nests when the water goes down.

There were quite a few baby mice on plants.  The centipedes and beetles were up on the vegetation too so the ducks had some easy food.  I also saw a blind snake swimming by.  They are only about 6" long.

Vacation

This is a bit late, mainly because I'm on vacation in Alexandria, VA this week and next.  I'll put up a few pics from earlier last week.  We had quite a bit going on with boat operator certification training and first responder training for the airport staff.  We had some really good instructors out to help.  I only did first aid training since I am still qualified as a Wilderness First Responder.  I didn't do the boat training either since I'm still good with that too.  We didn't have a tour group this week after Joe Van Os left with his group.  He has been here with his groups for 3 weeks.  His groups concentrate on photography, so his groups always have really great photos.

I won't do a blog this coming week, and probably not the next weekend either, since I won't be getting back to Midway until that Monday.

I went to Eastern Island to check the duck seeps and the boat operating course students came to pick me up.

 One project that the volunteers worked on was building nest boxes for Bulwer's petrels and Tristram's Storm petrels to nest in.  This is Peter, RJ, and Jennifer.

 The Red-footed boobies are nesting on Eastern Island.

 There are only a few White tern chicks around, but a lot of eggs that will be hatching soon.

 The chicks are getting bigger.  Here are a few over by the gun on Eastern Island.

I got to see one cool thing on vacation so far.  The space shuttle Discovery is on its way to the Smithsonian Museum for permanent display.  I got this shot as it flew over the Potomac River.  I was trying to get a photo of it flying over the monuments at the Mall, but I didn't have a good angle on it, or it was too far away when it flew over them.

Happy Easter and Happy Songkran

On Saturday we celebrated Songkran, which is the traditional Thai new year.  It starts with a parade, blessing, honoring the elders, pouring water on people, and then games.  The weather was a bit windy, but was nice and sunny, which is better since everybody gets soaked.  It was a great time, as usual.

We had a visitor here with The Ocenic Society who writes for the website treehugger.com.  She's been writing articles with slides about Midway.  Here's the link:

http://www.treehugger.com/search/?cx=017401606067716418337%3Abtpggki1yw8&cof=FORID%3A11&q=Midway&sa=Search

Chris Jordan and his crew are also coming back this week, so just a reminder to check out some of their movie trailers and writeups at:

http://www.midwayjourney.com/

The Songkran sign was made with Bouganvilla flowers and ironwood seeds.

The Songkran parade starts out near the clinic and ends up at Capt. Brooks Tavern.  

Pretty much everyone on island showed up to Capt. Brooks for the celebration.

A dunk pool was set up, and almost everyone got thrown in at some point during the day.

Rachon and Sam are grilling up some pork.  Some of the other Thai staff did the cooking, instead of the Clipper House staff, so we had a few different traditional dishes.

One of the games.

It has been a while since we've played volleyball.  It's good to see the court in use again.

We didn't have an Easter celebration, but back when the Navy was here, they had sunrise Easter services here at this cross.  It is on the eastern tip of the island near the harbor.

Here is a closeup of the plaque.

Trip to Kure Atoll

On Tuesday, I took a trip to Kure Atoll when they did the crew swap out.  I'd been there a couple of years ago on my way to Tern Island and wanted to get back to check on the progress of the invasive plant work.  It took the Kahana about 6 hours to get there.  I'm glad I took my anti-seasick medicine, because I probably would have been pretty queasy by the time we got there.  We got all the equipment and people switched out in about 4 hours.  Since we can't pull into the Midway harbor in the dark, we had to wait until Wednesday morning to come back in. It seemed like it was about a 3 day trip, with the 2 ship rides and the time on Kure, but was actually only 24 hours.  I've got more pics than usual, so I'll keep the text short this time.

Jim ties up the mooring lines as we leave Midway at sunrise.  At sunrise, you don't need much crowd control.  Only 3 people came to see the ship off.

Sunrise over Spit and Eastern Islands as we head out of the atoll.

 I've tried to get good flying fish pictures each time I've ridden on the Kahana.  I have yet to get any really clear ones.

 Here's a flying fish skimming across the surface.

This one isn't the clearest either, but you can see how big it's "flying" fins are.

 Green Island in Kure Atoll is barely visible in this photo on the horizon.  You can see why sea level rise is a bit of a concern in these parts.

Nalu, Julia, and I are taking the first load of buckets and gear to shore.

The dolphins came to escort us to the island.

There are a lot of buckets to swap out.

 More unloading and loading.

 This is the camp.  Storage buildings, bunkhouse, and outhouse on the left, old US Coast Guard building on the right.

 This is the new bunkhouse that they put up last year.  It's a bit more weatherproof than the tents that they used to use.

Kure has a big verbesina problem just like Midway.  They've had a year round camp, so they've been able to really knock it back.  It looks great now compared to the last time I was here.

This was a view of the same general area from back in June of 2009.  You can see that they've done a really nice job of geting rid of the verbesina. 

Back to Midway.  Here's a Laysan albatross preening one of the young Short-tailed albatross that has been coming showing up recently.

We had a medevac yesterday from a passing fishing boat.  It was really windy and choppy, but the swells were low so at least it wasn't as bad as the last one we did.  Sometimes I go out on the boat to pick up the patient, but yesterday I was the backup boat driver and stayed on the pier.  A US Coast Guard C-130 came out last night to bring the patient to Honolulu.