2 March (130 days on island)
The great, life-giving sun is rising in front of me again over the ocean, with little puffs of small cumulus clouds moving slowly south in front of it. They are a dusky lavender, with the tops of the nearest ones tinged in a soft pink. You know that Shakespeare line (Sonnet 18), ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’? That line rings so true to me here when I see these special sunrises, with such dense and striking colours – ‘Shall I compare thee to a Hōlanikū sunrise?’ It is a lovely time of day, fleeting, precious. Like a rainbow, or the flash of a parrotfish in the shallows before it darts away – you need to have your eyes open to see it, otherwise blink and it’s gone, and the sun becomes so bright in the sky that the colours have been washed away, replaced by lighter, flatter ones. Do you ever look at the sun and think how wild and precious it is that we even exist? Orbiting this enormous ball of gas and flame in the vacuum of space, a blue planet, teeming with little organisms like you, like me, like the albatross, flying and moving all around it. Our home, all together. I wish people saw it this way, and appreciated life in general on this earth, not just human life. I look over at a pair of albatross preening each other next to me, and at a tiny, week-old chick a few feet further down the path, preening itself as its parent stands over it doing the same. What does the future hold for them? What will I do to make it better? This latter question is the one that underscores my life, and that both haunts and drives me every day.
We finished our fourth rotation of the island on Friday! We are consistently finishing these in a month’s time and will hope to do two more before we leave in May. We work hard, and I feel pretty fatigued these days, like I need more sleep and food than I did at the start of the season. I’ve been at this for over 4 months now after all. That’s ok though, I’m no stranger to feeling how my body and physical needs change across a prolonged period of exertion. On a special note, we finished this scheduler with 0 drop-seed verb plants! Yay! That means that in February (and stretching back into January in fact), no verbesina plants we found were allowed to grow enough to drop their seeds into the island’s seedbank. Even in January, the only drop-seed we found was a small, weak one, so really, we have been pretty on top of things but slow winter growth rates do help. Tomorrow we start all over again with the first GRAs in the scheduler. How is it already March? We have also been busy taking inventories of anything and everything around camp, because this is the time when the upcoming summer crew needs to know what they’ll have available to them when they come in May, and need lead time to order what they don’t have. I’ve been assisting Ryan with battery system checks (very interesting to learn about that), whilst also taking care of the GPS data in terms of weed waypoints and our transect tracks, which must be downloaded and saved. This takes quite a bit of time and can be finnicky.
Well well, what else can I tell you about this week? The ʻā (red-footed boobies) have really started building their nests all over the naupaka, and this means that you need to be more careful as you move through it so as not to dislodge them and their eggs. They are goofy birds, and you see them alighting in the colony all over the place now to look for sticks and pieces of vine and nohu and all other manner of organic matter to take back to their nests. They will often grab onto a stick/vine that is still attached to the ground or to the naupaka, attempt to fly away with it, only to be pulled back down to the ground. Then, when a bird is finally successful and they attempt to fly away with their prize, an aerial chase can ensue, where other boobies or even iwa (frigates) can begin to chase them to steal their stick (many iwa are also starting to build their nests in the HELFOE canopies). The numbers of ewa’ewa (sooty terns) and pākalakala (grey-backs) have continued to grow, and you hear their squeaky-toy calls pretty much anywhere and everywhere now. The koaʻeʻula (red-tailed tropicbirds) were out in full-force yesterday for their midday displays, wheeling around and around each other, bright white feathers flashing in the sun, with albatross gliding smoothly through them. On Friday, Nadia, Ryan and I cut up and secured a gigantic net ball which had washed up on the Sector 4 shoreline. This was several thousands of pounds of various types of rope, net and line, and it took us almost 2 hours to cut it up into manageable chunks to move it up to the vegetation line, where we will come back to get it and move it to one of our marine debris staging areas. This was hard work, but it was satisfying to know we had removed this large hazard.
Some interesting albatross things I have seen this week include a chick with a badly deformed lower mandible, which stuck out at almost a right angle to the top mandible. The chick was alive and strong enough to move around, meaning it had hatched out over 2 weeks ago and had survived this period despite its deformity. Unlike Lazarus’ troubles though, which seemed like they were potentially resolving themselves as his neck grew stronger, this little chick’s bill would not fix itself, and it would eventually die, since it would not be able to get enough food. However the sheer determination of albatross parents with their chicks astounded and impressed me, and I have a soft spot in my heart for the little chicks who come out of their eggs not quite as they should be. I wish I had a rehab facility where I could take care of them. We also found a leucistic mōlī (Laysan albatross) chick, which was quite beautiful in an odd way. Its down was all white, kind of the colour of a little lamb; its eyes a pale brown; and its bill a soft pink tipped with pale blue. It was fat and large and doing well, so I’d love to keep tabs on it and find our what its adult feathers look like. Finally, I’ve been seeing several chicks around the colony which are very bloated, which incapacitates them. I found one of these dead in camp the other day, so I necropsied it to try and identify the cause of the bloat, expecting it to be in its digestive tract – a blockage of some sort, maybe plastic? However the bloating was around the leg area, with a large amount of air/gas accumulated between the muscle and the skin, like a balloon which could be deflated. This was equal on both sides, with no sign of inflammation inside or outside the body, and no fluid. This is very strange to me, and myself and the leaders of KAC are working to identify what might be going on. Some chicks do appear to ‘deflate’ when this happens to them, so it is not always fatal. My current theory is that it has something to do with their air sacs, but it might also have something to do with mites. In other albatross news, the aggressive attacks from ka’upu (black-footed albatross) (and to a lesser extend from mōlī) on other chicks have not really decreased but as the chicks get bigger they are better able to weather these attacks. Relatedly, I have been observing a late-hatched mōlī chick and its parent on the beach. This parent is not at all aggressive, and, fascinatingly, a large nearby chick – much older, and very fat – has been trundling over and muscling in, getting in between the parent and the little chick, and taking some of its feeds. It also wedges itself under the small chick’s parent, peeping furiously to be sat on. The parent then either tries to sit on both, or sits/stands there looking confused, with the small chick thus missing out on energy-saving brooding time and also on feeds. I have seen the robber-chick approach other mōlī adults in this way too, but they dart away. So, I believe I have witnessed in the flesh one of the reasons for the aggressive, unprovoked attacks on chicks. It prevents this sort of thing from happening. I must say that it makes more sense now, and I am grateful that I got to observe this dynamic with my own eyes.
It was Ryan’s 36th birthday this week, and Nadia made some delicious malasada donuts for him/us, and everyone made him really lovely gifts – a defining characteristic of this crew. We are all very artistic and creative in our own ways, and we enjoy giving our time, thought, and creativity to those we care about. Jacob made Ryan some origami pākalakala, Tlell painted him a miniature of a ka’upu in flight on her special Japanese cedar-paper, Nadia drew him an assemblage of different birds in a very frameable and striking piece, and I crocheted him a pākalakala with pipe-cleaners in the wings and tail, so that you can bend them around a bit. Ryan has a special love for pākalakala. If you are reading this and you plan on coming out to work on Hōlanikū, or if you are going out to a remote field camp somewhere else: I really recommend bringing something you can use to make little gifts for your crew-mates at special times. It makes a big difference to crew morale and it will be something they treasure and which will help them remember the season.
In personal news, I have been continuously working on my diaries, which I keep for every day I am out here. I write about 6-7k words per week, probably more, between my diary entries and this blog. I necropsy chicks whenever I have a spare moment after work, in order to take photos of the plastic and line inside them for outreach purposes. I keep up my photography in general too, looking for special moments, behaviour, interactions, for my personal publications and for outreach too. I’ve been working hard in the evenings on painting my fishing float with a bird for each crew member, and that has taken me many hours. It is my big art project of the season. And I was asked to be a judge in ACAP’s (Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels) photo competition for World Albatross Day 2025, which is exciting! I’ve also started to look ahead to my MSc fieldwork schedule, which I’ll be starting in late June studying grey-faced petrels in New Zealand. I’ve always got a lot on the go, and a lot to look forward to.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin