9 March (137 days on island)
I’m writing to you now not, as I usually do, by the light of the rising sun on my Sunday morning, but instead by headlight from the bunkhouse at 6am. I was awoken several times in the early hours by the scratchy calls of a manu-o-Ku (white tern) sitting somewhere on the bunkhouse eaves outside my west window, and so I decided to just get up and get on with my day. If something wakes me up after about 5am, the chances of me getting back to sleep are slim. You can imagine that this caused me significant issues when I first arrived here, being a light sleeper and all – the sheer ruckus caused by the birds resulted in many nights of nearly no sleep. Back then it was not the albatross, but the screaming noio kōhā (brown noddy) fledglings, and the ua‘u kani (wedge-tailed shearwater) mooing/wailing directly under the bunkhouse. It was not necessarily a smooth initial transition for me, and I remember also that everything swayed and rocked for days after the boat ride. But things have much improved since then. Back when there were dozens of mōlī pairs dancing around the building, their screams and moos sometimes woke me, but now there are much fewer adult albatross hanging around, and the chicks do not yet make much noise. This in fact leads me to something I wanted to describe for you: how I feel like the season is changing. Whilst there is still a lot of cloud and wind, the sun has been coming out more and more, and I have seen more sunsets again recently. This past week we had two days of solid sun with a dead flat lagoon, though the water is still chilly. But my sense of change stretches beyond the weather to the birds: things are shifting. The albatross chicks are starting to grow up, and walk around; the manu-o-Ku and noio (black noddies) are laying; the akihikeʻehiʻale (Tristram storm petrel) chicks are here; there is less nunulu (Bonin) displaying in the sky, because hatching time is near; the great ewa’ewa (sooty tern) congregations grow by the day; the red ‘iwa (frigatebird) throat pouches dot the HELFOE trees, with their haunting wailing drifting up from these canopies on the breeze; and birds like the ʻaoʻū (Christmas shearwater) and ua‘u kani are returning. And, we have ducklings! Nadia spotted our first brood of koloa maoli (Laysan duck) earlier this week, though I wasn’t around to see them myself. I’m excited to see them with my own eyes. Change is afoot, and Spring is in the air! You can feel that the island’s energy is shifting into a different gear.
We treated 60 acres this week. That’s a lot of ground covered! Many acres go into that number from the runway, which is an open space and easy to walk on (no burrows, thank god), but it is only easy to treat now because of the labour we put into it earlier in the season removing the nohu plants and heavily targeting incipients in it. I remember those early days, making excruciatingly slow progress up the sides of the seemingly endless runway in the late summer heat, air shimmering with it over the hard packed surface, no breeze, no albatross, nothing except the odd noio, and the ua‘u kani sitting out in the bright sun (somewhat strangely to me) in large groups. Bent over for hours, hand pulling huge nohu (Tribulus cistoides) plants with seedheads marked by centimetre long spikes, the loose dirt/gravel also full of these seedheads as you dug your fingers down, gingerly searching for the tap root to pull. Fingers numb and painful by the end of the day from being repeatedly stabbed, despite wearing gloves. That was quite an intimidating start, as was plunging into the thick naupaka in GRAs like CP1 and the south-west quadrants. But now, things make much more sense, and are easier, because of all the hard work we put in at the start of the season getting on top of weeds. We found many more verb sprouts this week, some Cassytha, and other weeds. On Monday we spent several hours moving that huge net ball (mentioned in last week’s entry) in dozens of smaller pieces from the beach to the runway, down the runway in wheelbarrows, and into the super-sacs. What an exhausting job, and hats off to the people who work for PMDP doing this all the time! We took more inventories of gear and supplies, such as the pallet tubs, where cane spiders live, much feared by me. One large one ran up my arm and I lost it. I can handle many things – biting birds, sea-cliffs, windstorms, long hours, exhaustion, river crossings, rough seas, high, icy mountain passes, ticks, all sorts – but spiders and large insects make me exceedingly uneasy. There was a huge cane spider doing gymnastics in the kitchen a few months ago and I had to go and fetch Jacob to capture it and bring it outside. Same story goes for the one who decided it was going to crawl on my beetle-net above my bed and startle me when I turned on my headlight. There is one who lives in the garbage can cubby we built at the start of the season we call ‘Bertha’, and when it is my turn on the garbage/lua chore, I live in fear for three weeks of emptying the garbage. I mean, don’t get me wrong, if I had to live with large insects to spend time with seabirds I’d do it in a heartbeat, but what I’m saying is that it isn’t my favourite thing. This week we also spent several hours cutting down more of the HELFOE trees we’d girdled along the sector 4-5 shoreline. Tlell and I tackled an absolutely monstrous one over two half-days, probably about 6 hours total, with some of its spidery trunks as thick as my waist. Keep in mind that we cut these down with small handsaws, the largest one being no longer than my hand and forearm together. So this is quite an accomplishment. Another day, Nadia, Tlell and I together went out and cut down another large grove of HELFOE. I was proud of us women – we might be slight in stature, but our determination is unmatched.
What else can I tell you? If you’ve been following my blog entries, you know that I will now move onto my discussion of the birds. With respect to the bloated albatross chicks, I have ascertained with the help of the Midway biologists and my necropsies that my hunch was correct: this is in fact an air-sac related problem (i.e. to do with air escaping the air-sacs birds have to facilitate continuous gaseous exchange). There were no mites present, and there was no air in the digestive tract at all, and no excess of plastic. I’m glad I was able to get this far, and will keep a sharp eye open for more cases to learn from.
The ʻaoʻū (Christmas shearwaters) are here! I first spotted one above the runway when we were treating, and pointed it out to the others – a very dark petrel, flying in long loops, seemingly prospecting the ground below. The next morning, an ʻaoʻū (presumably the same bird) was on the ground about 50m away, pretty much on the road to runway, and allowed us a good look. It was so dark, its bill so shiny – almost as if it had been buffed. Its eyes were little black, glistening pools. I gazed at it quietly, in awe. Procellariiformes are absolutely my favourite birds, and every time I see a new one, I count myself lucky. They spend their lives far, far away from where most humans live, and are Planet Earth’s ultimate navigators. They far outstrip all other animals in their ability to orient themselves and to find paths through the pathless seas, spending decades there, some flying millions of miles over their long lifetimes. Procellariiformes (aka tubenoses, the family of birds to which storm-petrels, albatross, and all tubenoses in between, belong to) fascinate and draw me on the deepest of levels – they are what drove me and gave me enough determination to change career track, no small feat after having pursued history all the way to PhD level and beyond; those days in Oxford seem so long ago now, and like a different woman was doing those things. Tubenoses are what gave me the drive to manage, somehow, to do seasonal seabird monitoring fieldwork even simultaneously with studying for that PhD; they brought me all the way to New Zealand, to research for my MSc; they are what brought me here, all the way to Hōlanikū. And they will continue to call me to places even farther flung in the future. My mission in life is to learn about them and protect them. From us. I see that more clearly now than ever. I don’t want to live in a world where petrels and albatross do not dot the high seas; do not bound on air currents, riding dark waves towards the horizon; do not fill the air above remote islands with the sounds of their reuniting, a chorus offered since time immemorial, when they find themselves together again after those long months, years, of solitude. Who are we humans to take that away from them? I will fight for them with everything I have, for as long as I have left.
I have greatly enjoyed watching how fat the albatross chicks are getting. Some of the ka’upu chicks are resembling bowling balls with heads, and it is a miracle to me that they can walk around at all – but walk they do (actually it’s more like a trundle, where they drag their big butts around), and they are starting to explore further and further afield – though they frequently return to the ‘safety’ (or, at least, the familiarity) of their nest bowls. Little Baby Caraway has started to do this too, bless her. I also love watching the parent-chick interactions when a parent returns to feed the chick. Sometimes it is perfunctory, with the parent arriving, feeding, and leaving immediately to go and find more. But sometimes the parent hangs around a little – 15 minutes, an hour, several hours, sometimes even overnight – and dotes on the little chick, preening it, speaking softly to it, sleeping cuddled up next to it. The akihikeʻehiʻale (Tristram storm petrel) chicks hatched this past month, and they are essentially little grey pompoms – they don’t really have a visible face, instead just a ball of grey floof from which a small, stubby black bill emerges, topped with a tube which, proportionally, is enormous.
The sooty tern congregations are truly something to behold. They are gathering in the air in their tens of thousands above the island, preparing to land, breed, and nest. You can hear them from the other side of the island in their swirling vortex of dark shapes, calling, calling, endlessly calling to each other. When you are beneath them, it feels like the very sky above you is moving; a staggering formation, murmuration, sensation, tessellation. More come every day to join these legions, and as I live here, I am witness yet again (the first time was the arrival of the albatross) to one of Planet Earth’s greatest spectacles: the convergence of breeding seabirds. To see with one’s own eyes proof of the ocean’s immense life-giving qualities, that it would allow and support such a density of living creatures, is a remarkable thing. It also highlights how precious are islands like Hōlanikū, for they cradle – quite literally – this life, allowing these birds to raise the next generation. We must protect places like this.
I have become very interested in photographing shadows this week, so when I managed to find some time to get out with my camera, that is what I was focusing on. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to capture some adult-chick interactions, but only via shadows. I also love that time of day when the ka’upu (black-footed albatross) have long shadows, to the extent that it looks like they have another dark bird connected to them at the legs, following and mirroring their every move. I also enjoyed spending time photographing the wonderful flying of the albatross over the turquoise lagoon, and the ways in which their wingtips trail the water when they bank, or when they fly very close to the surface.
Last night as I watched the sun go down, the lagoon water – a deep crystalline blue shot through with the yellows, pinks and oranges of the setting sun – was so very still. An albatross flew by me, mere feet away, low over the water, the tips of its wings kissing the surface. With each beat, each touch, they left a line of little ripples, as would a stone being skipped over the water of a lake. I pondered all I have written above, and more – wondering about the little chicks, the rattling ‘iwa, the swarming terns, the sharks in the deep, the surf pounding the reef, the great circles of life. Where would the momentum from his journey on Hōlanikū take me, small human?
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin