30 March (160 days on island)
The last week of the scheduler is always (to me) a tough one. We treated 33.4 acres this week. There are several difficult GRAs to transect, where you are being thoroughly tested by the burrows and the terrain whilst still really needing to be on your toes about the verb and the weeds in general. Most of the Bonin petrel eggs have hatched now, making you less worried about crushing an egg when you collapse a burrow, but it seems to all of us that the number of burrows has increased even compared to this time last month, meaning that new burrows are being dug by the birds even past their mating, laying, and hatching period. Why? One would have assumed that burrows are dug with the express purpose of laying an egg and raising a chick in them, so why would more be dug past that point in the yearly cycle? In any case, when I’m out there struggling through the burrows and the naupaka, I am not asking myself these scientific questions, instead just focusing on not totally losing my mind. So, we found lots of verbesina sprouts again this week, but we have once more completed a scheduler without any drop-seed plants. We are pleased with this achievement. It has come as the result of much hard work. We have now been through the entire island 5 times since arriving in October. We will go through all areas at least once more in the current crew’s time here. In addition to the treating, many other jobs were accomplished in camp, and preparations are ongoing for the upcoming crew swap in May, both in terms of liaisons with the mainland, and organising/inventorying/fixing what we have here.
The weather this week was temperamental, especially compared to the balminess of the week before. We’ve had a lot of rain, and the wind has been picking up over the last few days. Last night it was so strong that I thought the bunkhouse was going to fly away like Dr Who’s phone box. The walls pressed inwards from the wind and shuddered, and you could feel the whole structure creak in the face of the onslaught. When the weather gets intense like this, you really are reminded how you are a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the winds and weather sweep thousands of miles of open ocean with no barriers, whipping themselves up into a frenzy. It also makes me think of how brutal the weather must be down in the Southern Ocean, where there are no land-masses at all, no continents, to break the winds and weather. I would like to be there one day, with my goal being to work as a seabird scientist on the sub-Antarctics.
The albatross chicks have really been put through the ringer with the weather these past 4ish days. But as has happened several times now this season, they shock me with their resilience. When there are literal rivers cascading out of the sky, with winds strong enough to drive it all sideways, they hunker there on the ground, down pasted and matted to them, blue skin showing through the parts, eyes bulging and closed tightly, looking for all the world like little grey goblins. You’d think they’d succumb to the elements – but by and large, they do not. When the rain stops, and the wind begins to dry them, they start moving again, slowly. Then they shake themselves off, and begin to preen themselves. Indeed under the down of many chicks now lies the bright white feathers of a sub-adult. When the down was as wet as it had been the last few days, you could see those white feathers peeking through. Perhaps those helped them stay warm through the storms. In any case, I am continuously filled with awe at these birds. I watch them here, in their first months of life, withstanding intense pressures, and I know that out at sea, they ride the gales and storms around the oceans, carving a niche for themselves out of the great adversity and variability of the oceans. They mesmerise me in so many ways – that skill, knowledge, strength, and courage. I find pelagic seabirds, and petrels/albatross in particular, the most fascinating and mysterious of all animals.
I have spent a lot of time watching the chicks last week and this one, and become slightly obsessed recently with something I’ve called the ‘aeroplane stretch’. This is a special type of stretch that the chicks do, where they will raise their wings straight above their heads when they are sitting, with the equivalent of their forearms and wrists out to the side, and stick their heads out and down, so that they look like a little aeroplane. It is hard to describe, but luckily I have taken some photos to show you, attached below. I’ve spent hours – truly, at least 8 hours so far – sitting and staring at chicks doing absolutely nothing (i.e. endlessly sleeping and preening) in order to capture just the fleeting moments of their aeroplane stretches. There is no real way to predict when they will do this, except when they are not asleep, and the stretch itself lasts barely two seconds. So when you are sitting there with your camera, you need to have your eye trained on your subject for literally hours, ready to jump into action at any moment. So, enjoy some photos of chicks doing my favourite thing, one that you cannot capture unless you have the luxury of living with them: the aeroplane stretch. I love their little wing-stubs in the air, the head-down look, just these little compact bundles stretching out their growing muscles, feeling the wind in their down. I wonder what instincts, feelings, emotions, that sensation of wind awakens for them? Every time I see the stretch, it makes me smile. I do not see adults doing this stretch though, so that means that at some point, the chicks stop doing it. Which made it even more important for me to spend time documenting it now. I’m aware of how fixated I’ve become on very specific behaviours, but I do also find this quite funny. It is symptomatic of how much time I’ve spent with these birds.
Yesterday the wind was coming up, so I bundled myself up into my rain jacket, tucked away all my hair (there’s a lot of it), and spent time just watching the flying and the chicks. Large cumulus clouds drifted by which had a tendency to then form into anvil clouds from which rain would cascade down onto the sea, but when they were separate from each other, with the purest of blue skies in between, these clouds looked like great white ships with bellies of turquoise, sailing by above us, huge sails hoisted to catch the invisible winds. The albatross rode the winds and waves out in the lagoon, skipping, sling-shotting, bouncing, away towards the horizon in great sweeping arcs: soar, bank, tack, soar, bank, tack – if you know albatross, then you know exactly what kind of flight pattern I’m talking about. I love watching the ka’upu (black-footed albatross) in particular, since as slightly heavier birds their flight seems steadier, and their great dark shapes cut the wind like an obsidian knife glinting in the sun. I saw one bank very close to the water, steady wingtips expertly tracing even the excitable, frothing white horses. Its wing was so precise, and coming to such a point, as to resemble a writing quill spelling out a message in the waves, one that was simultaneously eternal and momentary.
On a sombre but resolved note, yesterday I came across a mōlī (Laysan albatross) chick on the camp beach path that had a bright orange ribbon, about 4’ long, trailing out of its bill. The chick was alert, alive and well, but I knew in a heartbeat what that ribbon was attached to at its other end. I very quickly snapped a few documenting photographs, before gently tugging on the ribbon, hoping against hope that what it was attached to was not lodged in the digestive tract. To my great relief, I felt some give, and on the second tug, out slithered from the chick’s bill a bright orange rubber balloon, about 4 inches long. The ugly thing now lay on the sand next to the chick, with its long trailing ribbon, at the end of which a loop still existed where it had no doubt been tied to a child’s wrist. The orange balloon was Mickey-Mouse shaped, and still had black writing that read ‘Tokyo Disney Resort’, along with a black Mickey-Mouse icon. I paused to remember the moment, disgusted. I was very glad I’d been able to remove this piece of garbage from the albatross, and that the balloon had not made its way further down into the digestive tract, blocking it. But I was horrified at the thing, at the people who sold it, and the people who bought it. It reminded me again of hiking in the mountains on the PCT, where I would regularly, and I mean, once every week or two weeks, for 5 months straight of hiking in the vast wilderness, find balloons on the ground, drifted away from some kid and their parents. Good thing I’d come out to the beach when I had this morning and was paying attention, otherwise this chick might have swallowed it all.
Next time you feel like buying your kid (or anyone) a balloon, remember: this is where they end up. In the gullets of albatross chicks, who are really just someone else’s kid. Would you want a balloon in your child’s throat or stomach? Your sister or brother’s child, your friend’s child? No? Then stop buying balloons please.
Well now, what else can I tell you? I had the pleasure of seeing a rainbow touch down in the lagoon right in front of me the other day, before I was immediately soaked with the oncoming rain in which the rainbow lived. I have decided that a good way to describe to you the sound of begging chicks in a colony is to liken them to a bunch of un-oiled door hinges squeaking over and over in random time. That is what the ka’upu colony down on the beach sounds like when many parents have returned at once to feed their chicks. I saw a scrap between a wedge-tailed shearwater and a Christmas shearwater, and the Christmas won! Sunsets here are often defined by the two colours purple and orange, and this is quickly becoming my favourite colour combination. I have rarely seen it in such brilliant harmony in nature, except for a few times when I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, in sunsets around Mount Shasta. There is now a special connection between this place, and that one, in my mind. In another moment this week, the sun was descending towards the horizon as a giant ball of orange, and as it neared the ocean’s surface, a remarkable thing happened that I have not seen before: the ocean took on the reflection of the sun before it touched the horizon, where it was as though the horizon held a great pool of pure light. For the briefest of moments then, it looked like there were two suns – one above, and one below, just about to set. Then the sun touched the horizon, the two melded into one, and the moment passed. Far off in the distance, where the sun had just set, the dark aquiline shape of an albatross bounded over the horizon.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin