20 April (180 days on island)
The sky looks like a watercolour this morning. Shadows, clouds, blues, violets, and yellows all blend together, and the banks of cloud remind me of the fog banks that lie over the ocean on the west coast of Canada. Sounds of the colony fill the air. Adult mōlī (Laysan albatross) dance with one another, whilst thousands of little fuzzy chicks look on, at once fascinated, bemused, and irritated, at the antics of these great white birds. The chicks themselves stand sometimes and walk a little distance, flap their now very long wings, still down covered – then often fall forward onto the tip of their bill. Although they cannot go far now, and they may stumble and fall, do they imagine that they are destined for something immense? To move effortlessly in the wind, to enter into another medium of life? To be freed from the shackles of terrestrial dimensions? When they open those long, spindly wings, do they hear the whispers, see the visions, and feel the enormity, of what is to come? Sometimes I see myself reflected back at me in these little chicks.
We treated 36.7 acres this week. It was a hard week. Full of burrows, naupaka, ticks, wasps, and other difficulties. The GRAs in the last two weeks of the rotation are some of the toughest. The work goes on though as there are always more sprouts to find, more seedbank to deplete, more grasses to spray, more Cassytha to rip up. One day I hope that this island will be free again, and able to stand on its own feet without humans here at all. Another project this week has been the food-room painting project. Jacob, Tlell and I have been hard at work chipping old paint off the walls and ceiling, washing the years of grime off these, and then putting a fresh coat of white paint on for the new crew. This is a big job and it looks like a bomb went off in the food-room, but it will be finished this week.
On the 22nd the five of us will have been here 6 months. We are now entering into our final month on the island, and I feel that I must begin saying goodbye. This is a painful process for me, since I have grown very attached to the island, and especially to the birds who live here. They are like my thousands of weird, quirky and loveable roommates. I so wish I could have seen the albatross fledge. It will feel strange saying goodbye to them without knowing their fates. I care deeply about this place that I have called home for the past 6 months. I travelled thousands of miles to help restore, protect, and advocate for this atoll. Especially towards the very end of the season, I anticipate that I will need time to myself to process leaving. I expect to be able to do this on the final weekend here. The feeling is a bittersweet one.
What can I tell you about this week? Yesterday, Tlell, Jacob and I made Easter makalena (short-tailed albatross) cupcakes! This is because a) we saw another makalena this past week, which was very exciting. One of my life birds! And b) because the makalena are true Easter-coloured birds. They have the baby pink and blue bill, the golden head, the cream face and chest – they are basically a giant walking and flying Easter egg. So, we were inspired by the makalena. We drew out some head profiles of makalena, then we piped out melted chocolate chips onto wax paper, tracing the head sketch that was underneath. We let the chocolate albatross heads set. I made some frosting, and used food colouring to make baby blue, pink, and a soft yellow. We placed the chocolate albatross head outlines on the tops of the vegan cupcakes we baked, then we filled them in with the coloured frosting – pink and blue on the bill, yellow on the head, then a little chocolate eye and nare. We were extremely pleased with the results, and I will be talking about these special Easter makalena cupcakes for a long time. We also did this with very rudimentary supplies! Teamwork and a true love of albatross can create masterpieces apparently.
On my last blog entry, the masses demanded duckling photos – so I give you ducking photos! But of course I was never going to give you classic photos of ducklings in the sun, frolicking in the green grass. Instead I give you photos of ducklings frolicking in an albatross chick corpse! This is what I found 8 of them doing on Friday, happily romping around in the stinking corpse, bouncing on the down, eating up the flies buzzing around. Sort of revolting but also fascinating to watch. The hen looked on, keeping watch, as the 8 tiny ducklings nourished themselves thanks to the death of another young bird. Nothing goes to waste, and when I see an albatross chick die, it is some consolation to me that native plants may grow up in their place, or that their body will go on to feed new life.
The ‘ua‘u kani (wedge-tailed shearwaters) have been exceptionally noisy this week, and their moaning, wailing, howling, and screaming seems to only be increasing in volume and intensity as the weeks draw on. There is a pair who have decided to nest under my bedroom in the pile of lumber under the bunkhouse, and every night their strange, haunting calls drift up through my floorboards and eventually lull me to sleep. I can’t really describe it to you in words – maybe go and look up ‘wedge-tailed shearwater moaning calls’ online after you read this, and then imagine yourself living and sleeping directly above this every night. It certainly isn’t for everyone, and sometimes it can give me very strange dreams when the wailing and moaning creeps into my head as I sleep – but I do love it. I know that I will miss it terribly when all I can hear is car and city noise outside my bedroom window.
The albatross chicks continue to grow. Many of them are beginning to look like real birds now, not just amorphous lumps of fuzz. You can see lots and lots of white feathers, not only under the down, but also beginning to exist as large white patches where the down itself has fallen off. Dark grey flight feathers have also begun to appear on some chicks’ wings, which is very exciting. The wings on the chicks are now becoming exceptionally long, harbingers of the great soaring devices they will become, and on which the birds will travel millions of miles over their lifespans. However, for now, they look spindly and floppy, and the chicks don’t quite seem to know what to do with them. I have conducted more necropsies this week of large ka’upu (black-footed albatross) chicks, and I found (as expected) large amounts of monofilament line in their stomachs. It breaks my heart to see this, and every time as I bury them, I apologise – I’m sorry that you never got to fly. I try to capture the ups and downs of being a field biologist in my blogs and stories. Although it is stunning out here, and I am so incredibly lucky to be on the atoll, there is also a great deal of sadness, which it is important to let oneself feel and process, especially if one is going to then tell stories and create material that will move people.
On our Friday shorebird survey, Tlell and I saw a Coco’s booby, which was cool. They kind of look like a brown booby and a masked booby had a baby. We also saw how the ‘ewa’ewa are all landing in NP1 (one of the GRAs near north point) and will be laying very soon. The ground up there bristles with tern, and there is a constant cacophony. We also commented on the incredible ‘apartment-building trees’ – the HELFOE where ‘iwa (frigates) and ‘ā (red-footed boobies) nested in the canopies, noio (black noddies) and manu-o-ku (white terns) nested in the branches below, albatross chicks and ‘ewa’ewa (sooty terns) and pakalakala (grey-backed terns) were on the surface under them (and some ‘ua’u kani), and then Bonin petrels below them, underground. Sometimes a brown or masked boobies will be very nearby nesting on the surface too, and maybe an akihikeʻehiʻale (Tristram’s storm petrel) under a clump of kawelu grass a few feet away. How stunning is the biodiversity here, that you can look at one tree and see all of that!
Until next week. Happy Easter!
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin