23 February (123 days on island)
Hello again from Hōlanikū! I sit on the front porch of the main house writing to you now, with the sun coming up brilliant and orange over the east side of the island. The moon is a high hint of a sliver in the sky. There are large banks of dusky lavender coloured cloud banks towards the east and the south, and a few high cumulus clouds which are catching the light and turning a soft yellow, which will soon turn to cream, then white. The breeze is gentle but consistent, and hundreds of albatross silhouettes fill the sky before me. Their whistling, mooing, clacking, and screaming fills the air. We have several nests right here around our dish washing station in camp – one of them whose chick is called ‘Slippy’, because his parents are called ‘Sloppy’ – since they chose to set up their nest near our food-scrap (slop) bucket. When albatross choose a place to nest, try as you might in order to mitigate your impact on them, they seem to firmly believe that it is none of your business trying to move them! They are exceptionally stubborn. They will return, no matter how many times you try to shift them. So you must simply learn to live around them, and to accommodate your own lifestyle to theirs. We have a nest under the dish-drying station, whose chick I named Cartwright, because he lives right next to a small black cart. Then, we have another nest, whose egg is only just now pipping! Very late. I was not expecting it to hatch, and every night as we did dishes and looked down the back of the sink unit onto this nest, we commented on it, and asked ourselves whether it was fertile. I will have to give that one a name once he is a bit older. We also have a single, unemployed bird who consistently takes up his position, every night around 5pm, near the dish-drying table. We call him ‘The Inciter’, since he calls birds over and flirts with everyone, but then frequently gets into loud biting and screaming fights with them, subsequently getting under our feet as we try to do dishes. A little ways away from the dish area, along the side of the house, we have another chick named ‘Widget’, because one of his parents, who we named ‘Fidget’, would do exactly that for days and weeks on end as they sat on the egg. Slippy is currently asleep, Cartwright is nest-building (small-chick-style, aka sort of aimlessly and ineffectually moving around pieces of grass and single grains of sand, but hey, he’s trying!), and Widget is looking around alertly at all the comings and goings of the other birds. All three chicks are alone, awaiting the return of their parents. Another adult albatross has now walked across the porch inches from my feet, passing under our outdoor table (built by Jacob a few weeks ago – it’s great!), and has gone to peer into the open kitchen door. They are very curious birds. I hope that gives you a little window into what it feels like to sit here on the atoll, writing with my black coffee on a Sunday morning.
We treated 38 acres this week. Nothing hugely special happened on the treatment front – we are finding lots of grass sprouts, and we continued through some tough naupaka and burrow terrain. I had some moments of exhaustion, which, for me, often turn into me finding random things hysterically funny. This time, it was falling into an extremely deep, sandy burrow – the kind you dread when you’re out treating, because digging it out will see you shoulder deep in a pit of sand for up to 5 minutes, trying to get to the bottom or the tunnel tube to see if there is a bird in there. I fell into this, and after what had already been a long day of trimming down HELFOE and treating another burrowy GRA, I was tired – so there I was, mumbling and grumbling to myself. When I’d finally sorted this burrow, heaved myself up with my pack on, took a step back – BAM! Into another burrow, but this time I fell, and ended up on my back, beetle-like, arms and legs waving, actually inside this second giant sand-pit burrow, unable to right myself. At this point I started to laugh, and I couldn’t stem the laughter, until I had tears streaming down my face. The silliness of it sometimes dawned on me, and I just had to laugh. We spent some time up in the north of the island too this week, treating those GRAs, where there are lots of giant HELFOE. These must be gone through underneath to some extent to look for incipient weeds, and I really don’t like them. The broken branches are eye- and skull-height for me, and seemingly looking to poke your eyes out. The land under large HELFOE trees is a cursed one, full of these sharp spear-branches, caked bird poop (iwa and booby), bird skeletons (often of iwa, which have somehow fallen down into the branches from the canopy), and, if near the shore, garbage that has washed up and remained strewn around the roots and branches.
In terms of birds and natural history observations, this week has been a turning point in several ways. First, many Koaʻeʻula (tropicbirds) are starting to have eggs. Their aerial courtship displays have been increasing these past weeks in their intensity and in the number of birds engaging in them. Yesterday for example, everywhere you looked on the horizon was dotted by dozens, hundreds, of bright white shapes flying in loose clumps, with birds flying up and down and around one another, showing off their long red tails. Their density was truly staggering. The air was filled with the sound of their staccato calls which, combined with the sound of the albatross colony from below, made you feel sandwiched by sound, your ears pressed by bird-cacophony – seabird colonies, the original surround-sound! So anyways, these displays have turned into eggs on the ground, meaning the koaʻeʻula are even less likely to flush than they were before. This in turn translates into extremely loud screaming when you pass by their nests under the naupaka.
The manu-o-Kū (white terns) have also started laying, and there are some extremely cute little blondie chicks sitting in HELFOE branches if you look carefully. There are also several pairs around camp who are looking suspiciously as though they might lay. The thing with manu-o-Kū is that, since they are geared to lay their eggs on the bare surface of a tree branch – no nest, nothing, with the adult simply holding on to the branch and brooding the egg until it hatches – they will also lay their eggs in extremely random places around camp where you would not expect eggs to be. And places you really don’t want them to lay their eggs, because we use those spaces! Places like the tops of our window shutters, which we need to bring down to protect the windows in high-wind events; the steps of our ladder to the roof; the top of the shower stall. We try to shoo them away from these places to discourage them, but they too are exceptionally stubborn. They are also very cute, and the pairs, when together, do this sort of tippy-tap dance around the place they are aiming to nest, repeatedly look down at their toes (like noddies do), preen each other, and half-close their little dark eyes, churring and purring softly at each other.
The changes also extend to the arrival of the sooty and grey-backed terns. The sooties, with whom we overlapped very briefly when we first got here, are not on the ground yet or laying, but over the week they have started to grow in numbers flying around the island. Their squeaky-toy like flight call, sounding like a garbled ‘Wide awake! Wide awake!’ can be heard more and more as dusk approaches, and as they start to congregate in a vast, swirling sooty-vortex in the sky over the north-east of the island. After dark is when the sound grows to a fever-pitch. The sky is then awash with sound, especially when added to the thousands of nunulu (Bonin petrels) flitting through the skies, raucously calling, sounding like mini record player-scratches, but one every few seconds. Then there is the odd Tristram storm petrel giggle which punctuates the night – an eight or nine syllable mini-trumpet sound, rising and falling, which is altogether unbelievable to your ears the first time you hear it, as are the calls of storm petrels in general. Albatross, tropicbirds, sooties, Bonins, storm petrels, and the sound of the crashing waves on the reef – this is the soundtrack to my life.
Finally, the albatross colony (oh yes, I can’t have a blog entry without talking at length about them) is undergoing its own changes. There are now fewer adults on the ground than I have seen since the albatross were all arriving to breed at the start of the season. There are of course still thousands of them around, the fields in front of camp dotted everywhere with white (and the occasional dark ka’upu) shapes, but before, when they were incubating, there were some places in the fields where at a distance you couldn’t even see the green ground for the birds. Now, the gaps between the remaining adults are larger, and these are filled and punctuated by little dark fuzzy grey pineapples – chicks. For the moment, the majority are still in their nest bowls, getting fatter with every feed. Some are starting to wander a little bit, exploring the surrounding few metres around their nest. They have huuuuge butts, which they sort of drag around as they try to walk. I have seen more mōlī attacks on other chicks now, but this behaviour still does not seem to occur with the same frequency or violence as it does in the ka’upu (black-footed albatross) colonies. Many of the chicks are very handsome indeed, and I have started to name several of them. Of course, we have Baby Caraway, who lives on the bunkhouse front step. I watch her closely, and she is doing well, being brooded still occasionally in inclement weather by a parent, being fed, and the other day, being cuddled and preened by both parents. It is wonderful to watch these family moments, because they are so few in a mōlī life, and as the chick grows and her energy demands grow with her, the parents will work harder and harder, becoming more and more strung out, and overlapping less and less, as they hunt for her and bring her food back. We have Lazarus, about whom I wrote last week – he also is still alive, well and growing (somewhat miraculously, despite his physical struggles and his down being frequently oiled because of his difficulties feeding), you’ll be glad to know. We have Golden Child, who is a very lovely and beautiful mōlī chick living on the beach path. He is wonderfully fat and cared for, never oily, and with his down moving from a pale grey to a darker charcoal/brown on his body. Then, there is Ryan Gosling, a beautiful ka’upu chick who lives on the road to runway – handsome, strong, with even his head-down seemingly styled fashionably. This one’s parent is frequently around as well, and is quite fierce. There are also a few late hatchers around – just yesterday I saw one emerging from its little egg shell. The size difference between this chick and the 2-week old chick next to it was staggering. They double in size in their first week, and the 2-week old chick could practically have eaten this one. Imagine if human babies grew at that rate!
One thing I struggled with this week was finding a huge amount of fishing line inside a little ka’upu chick who passed away. I have been allowed by KAC and Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge to opportunistically dissect dead chicks, in order to document the plastic found inside them for outreach purposes. This is a grim job, but I offered to do it, because as unpleasant and ugly as it is to look at these things, someone has to look at them, otherwise these chicks just suffer and die silently. If there is even a small chance that my words and photos can reach someone who can make a difference, it is worth it to endure the heartache of such a task. I had joyfully watched this chick hatch and grow over several weeks, and then a few days ago, I noticed he wasn’t doing well. He looked a healthy enough size, but was weak, and couldn’t hold his head up. The next morning I found him dead. Yesterday, when I had a look at his stomach, I immediately noticed even before opening it that it was unusual. It was distended, hard to the touch, as though filled with solid objects. When I opened up the stomach, it didn’t even stink, that’s how little organic matter and oil there was inside. The majority of its contents were fishing line, wrapped around and around itself, a few squid beaks, some pieces of plastic, and a small amount of purple, stringy remains of squid slurry and some flying fish roe. There was no way the chick could have passed this, and it looked like essentially nothing more could be fitted into the stomach, so the chick probably starved, despite his stomach being ‘full’. It was a terrible sight. I took it all out, cleaned it, took documenting photos, and then buried the chick silently. I felt a lot of anger and sorrow then.
There is of course so much more I can write, but I’d be here all day. Perhaps I’ll write a book about my season here one day. If you are interested in supplementary content in the form of nature writing, science communication, and photography/videography, you can always head over to my Instagam page (PeakstoPetrelsPhotography) and give me a follow.
Cheers, and I hope you have a great week, wherever you are. Thank you for reading! Additionally, if you have any questions or anything in particular you’d like to hear more about or see more featured in my blog entries, feel free to comment below, and I’ll see it.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin