16 March (144 days on island)
We treated 43 acres this week. On the work front, we had a more ‘laid back’ week – although treating 43 acres in a week could hardly be described as ‘laid back’! We had more afternoons back in camp than usual which is what made it seem more chilled. So, perhaps ‘comparatively laid-back’ would be a better description. The reasons for this week’s slightly different pace were twofold. First, the weather. We were meant to have some heavy rain especially over Wednesday-Thursday. We didn’t want to get stuck treating in a downpour, because not only is this miserable, but the rain also washes off the herbicide we spray, so unless we pull everything, we can’t treat for weeds in the rain. The rain never really came in the end, though we had spells of drizzles and some moderate rainfall. The wind was also originally meant to get pretty high, but it never came up higher than the low thirties. In addition to the weather, we also had some unfortunate incidents with the koloa pōhaka (Laysan ducks) and what we expect is botulism type-C, which meant a few of us needed to remain in camp or close to it. On Monday we found several dead ducks in the fields nearby camp as we treated, and then on Wednesday morning a sick duck was found in camp. She was in our care from Wednesday-Thursday with suspected botulism, but sadly she did not make it. Waterfowl are particularly susceptible to botulism, and it unfortunately is in the environment on Hōlanikū, and ducks often get sick at this time of year. We tried to head it off this year by removing various water sources from the island, as it was suspected that the ducks might be getting botulism from invertebrates building up in them. As island custodians, part of our job is to try to break the botulism cycle, and to protect our small population of the critically endangered koloa pōhaka species here. Botulism type-C issues have however been ongoing for almost a decade now and we hope to find no more dead/sick ducks this season.
Although this week thus saw some sad events, the slight break it gave us in terms of physical output was welcomed, since all of us were starting to feel it in one way or another. We are still on schedule for finishing this rotation within the month, but I do feel more rested today than I normally would at this point in the weekend. We are still keeping on top of the weeds and only finding small non-seeding verbesina plants, maybe a few inches tall at most, and most of the time I still just find them at the cotyledon stage. On one of the rainy days we played Wingspan (a bird boardgame) together, and I brought out my Oceania expansion pack, so we had fun learning how to play with that and seeing the new birds added to the game. Maintenance jobs were also accomplished around camp, such as finishing caulking my bunkhouse windows; fixing one of the water tanks; fixing the downspout off the gutter of the main house; getting drinkers out for the ducklings; clearing camp paths; nursery work; attending to wasp traps; etc. I also got out on a shorebird survey on Friday, and Ryan went out on a monk seal survey.
Now onto the birds – my favourite topic.
Storytime! Over a week ago, I was up late writing in my diary (as usual) and when I went outside in the dark night to brush my teeth, I had heard a strange call – a petrel of some sort, I knew that for certain, but it was no petrel we had yet heard on island. I knew it could not be the recently returned Christmases, since I knew what they sounded like. I took a recording. A few nights later, I heard it again (this past Tuesday). I had told the others about it, and Tlell had told me to wake her up/fetch her next time I heard it. So I went to get her, and together we stood there in the dark on the bunkhouse beach path, surrounded by albatross chicks on the ground and chirp-squawking Bonins in the air, looking up eagerly into the night sky for our mysterious visitor. Suddenly, we heard it together – a long scream rising, over about one and a half seconds, to a high pitch, followed by low whooping calls. The moon was out, and we were astonished to catch sight of the bird in the silvery light: a large (compared to Bonins) petrel, with shallow, almost fluttering wingbeats (almost like a moth), long wings, and on the underside of the wing near the tip, flashes of silver. That was all the moonlight and our red lights would allow us to see. We watched it do several more passes, and heard it several times again. We already knew so much more than we’d known before. We knew its flight pattern; that it didn’t have a white belly; its relative size and shape; the silvery underwing; and its call. All fired up, we went back to the main house and pulled down the well-thumbed seabird field guides from the shelf. By headlight, we settled on three potential suspects: the Kermadec, Murphy’s, or Herald petrel. Annoyingly, few seabird guides describe the calls of petrels, normally simply describing them as ‘silent at sea’, but most people don’t spot them over the land at their colonies I guess. We’d have to wait until the next day when we had some internet to listen to calls on there and to get an ID. The next day at lunch, Tlell and I spent awhile furiously listening to eBird and Xeno-Canto recordings of those species, and then we had it: the same call as we’d heard, and that I’d first heard by the bunkhouse. It was a Kermadec! A lifer for me, and we’d probably seen a dark morph. We were really excited to have solved the mystery, and to have had a lovely Kermadec petrel visiting us. I’d heard that they’d been seen/heard on Midway before, but here on Hōlanikū we must be nearing the northern edge of their range. I have listened for it again but have not heard it since. It is a special kind of thrill and excitement to hear a petrel in the night – one that always gives me goosebumps, makes my ears prick, and my heartbeat quicken.
On Thursday, more excitement: we saw our first baby nunulu (Bonin petrel)! It was so adorable, I just melted when I saw it. A little ball of fuzz, white and pale grey. It was about 98% fluff and 2% actual body. It may have been one of the cutest things I’d ever seen in my life. On Friday as I was looking around for shorebirds, the ‘iwa (frigatebirds) were showing off their tremendous red throat pouches in the HELFOE canopies. There were so many of them perched there with the pouches inflated that it looked like we had gigantic apple orchards growing all around. It is quite remarkable, the way the males throatily croak/click to the females, waving the pouches around (somewhat obscenely to my eyes) and fluttering their outstretched wings; then, they begin to wail and whoop, and start to really go bonkers when a female flies over them, assessing the display of each individual male. On sunny, breezy days here, the air is filled with the sounds of ‘iwa carried to us on the wind, and it makes for a hauntingly beautiful chorus. On Friday we also saw an albino mōlī (Laysan albatross) chick! This was very interesting to me, and the chick was very beautiful, in its own way. We had previously found a leucistic chick, as I mentioned last week or the week before, but this one had properly pink eyes, which distinguishes it as a proper albino. The leucistic one was much paler than a normal chick, but still had dark eyes, darker skin than the albino, and darker bill-plates. This albino one had pink eyes, all-pink skin, and pale pink/cream bill plates. Truly a fantastic being to observe. I am very curious about how these birds fare, if they ever fledge, and if they in turn ever survive into breeding age. Do they struggle with the sun out on the open ocean? How many mōlī carry the albinism gene? One of the many perks of living in a huge seabird colony for such a long time is that you get to see the minority cases, the unusual ones, the conditions that affect the 0.001%. Crossbill deformities due to heavy-metal contaminants; leucistics; albinos; musculature deformities; I have seen all of these things. It can be sad, but the scientist and natural historian in me is absolutely fascinated by it.
I paused again a few times this week to watch the ka’upu (black-footed albatross) dances still ongoing between young birds around the colony. I so love these rituals, their intensity and passion, the expressive faces of the albatross, the head bobbing, the head-up-to-the-sky screaming, the tippy-toes move, the wide-eyed approach and neck arch – ‘hey, you’re pretty – wanna dance?’. The flying in the wind has also been phenomenal over the colony, with incredibly beautiful backdrops of sunbeams piercing their way through the grey-cloud ceiling, and reaching down to the slate-grey sea, illuminating it and turning it into quicksilver. My mum always told me that sunbeams were ‘God talking to someone’ – I’m not religious in that sense, but I do find that I am becoming increasingly spiritual as I age and as I spend time in the great wide world. I always think of her when I see those sunbeams. I wonder who the universe was speaking to in those moments? Albatross, probably. One of the funny things about sunbeams is that one can never see when one is in them – it just feels to you like a brief spell of sun in an overcast day, but to an outsider looking in, you’d be under a sunbeam. There’s a lesson there – listen hard for the moments where something, or someone (your intuition? your heart?) is speaking to you – otherwise you’ll forever only be looking at it happening to others. Grab those moments of clarity and remember them, because there might in fact be more to them, than what they seem to you in that moment.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin