Inquisitive chicks

The chicks are interested in everything. If you stand still very long they will walk to you and give your legs the same once over they are giving my bike. It is best to keep moving though as eventually they will bite down hard to see what you taste like. Ouch!

Return to Midway

I flew to Midway Friday evening and arrived about 9 p.m. I knew most of the guys that were helping with the plane and it felt good to be back. The internet is deadly slow and I'm not sure exactly how much I will be able to post but I will try to post a couple times a week.

Albatross Numbers

Here is another look at a small piece of the colonies on Sand Island. Find me in the red shirt in the middle of the colony. I don't have all the data from the count but in round numbers we counted about 479,000 Laysan Albatross nests and about 27,000 Black-footed Albatross nests. That represents a lot of walking, climbing, crawling, brush crashing work. If I add in 500,00 non breeding adult albatross, 100,000 plus Bonin Petrel and a few thousand other assorted sea birds that means there are more than 1.6 million sea birds on the 1,200 acres that comprise Midway Atoll.  I've been in the middle of a lot of sea birds! It was a very energetic group of counters who happily put in the needed effort to complete the work. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to go to Midway again and to participate in a count like this in the largest albatross colony on the planet.

Band Repair

As we were getting ready for our counting this morning I noticed a Laysan Albatross that was limping. I looked more closely and it had an old style band that was made of aluminum and it had worn and opened to the point that it fell down on top of the foot and was cutting into the bird's leg. I captured the bird and one of the other count team members with banding experience used a pair of pliers and opened the band and closed it on the other leg to allow the injury to heal. The island biologist re found the bird later and placed another permanent band that will be much longer lasting and should cause no more trouble for the bird.

Albatross Numbers

The magnitude of the albatross colony here on Midway is hard to comprehend. The 5 of us on the team that I'm part of counted on Eastern Island Thursday and Friday. The landscape is pretty open and there are not many petrel burrows to fall into so our count numbers were pretty good for those days. Thursday the 5 of us counted more than 20,000 nests and Friday we counted about 18,500 nests. There are 3 teams working and it will take 3 weeks to cover the 3 islands that comprise Midway Atoll. There are a lot of nesting albatross here. I've not taken a picture that does it justice but I've included my best effort.

Albatross Count

 Our Internet speeds have been very slow so no pictures today. The count is going well with an energetic group of 17 people counting everyday. Today we woke to heavy rain and wind but we still worked until noon. We are a little ahead of schedule so we were able to take the afternoon off to get all of our things dried out. I can put on dry rain gear in the morning, so that will be good. These birds have many difficulties surviving in the world and add to that some deranged person is shooting what look like darts at the albatross. The best guess is that some bored fisherman in the North Pacific is taking shots at the albatross around their boat with a blow gun. Our group has found 2 Black-footed Albatross with embedded darts, one of which was removed, but the other bird they were unable to catch. If we see 2 that are alive and flying I wonder how many don't live. The Black-footed Albatross is much more rare that the Laysan and it's a shame to see this kind of thing happening.

Albatross Count

I'm back on Midway for the albatross count. Seventeen of us will count every active nest on Sand Island, Eastern Island and Spit Island over the next 3 weeks. There are several different ways the count is accomplished but most of the techniques include putting a small dot of traffic paint beside each nest and then following along the line of counted nests established by the counter nearest you. The total count will probably be somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 nests so we learn a lot about large numbers. The total number of albatross on the 3 islands is about a million nesting albatross and then about 500,000 non breeding adults so there are lots of albatross around us all the time. These 3 island comprise the largest albatross colony on the planet.