11 May (200 days on island)
Our penultimate weekend is upon us, and we finished our last week of formal treatment this week (provided all goes as planned with departure). We made it halfway through our 7th rotation around the island. The coming week – our last full week on island – will see us doing the albatross chick count instead of treatment, but those of us who are counting chicks in GRAs with active verbesina points will be checking those points too as we go. It felt pretty strange to hang my spray-pack up on the wall, and to know that I was not going to be picking it up again on Monday. It feels cool though to have moved the weed eradication programme forward so much this season.
This past week we treated 50 acres. The second week of the rotation starts to see some baddy GRAs like CP10/11 (heavy naupaka and bad burrows), SWQA3/A1 (dunes and thick naupaka, incredibly deep, sandy burrows), and RTE 7.1 (very big GRA, very long). We are also finishing up some odds and ends around camp to prepare for departure/the new crew’s arrival. Our food supply is dwindling a bit now – although we technically do have lots of food and emergency rations left, the number of ingredients we have to work with, that we actively want to work with, are getting sparse on the shelf. The weather is changing, slowly but surely. Gone are those frigid north wind days of winter, and increasingly now the air and water are warmer, and the days are getting hot around midday. The nights can feel sticky again, like they did at the start of the season.
Yesterday we had a big dump of rain, along with thunder and lightning. But the air and rain were warm. When it rains, all the albatross chicks sit still and their down mats down on their bodies. At that point you can start to see how small they actually are compared to the volume their feathers give them. Their skin shows blue from between the feathers, their eyes bulge, and they look for all the world like little goblins or gargoyles. There are some very comical hairdos going on. I worry about them much less when the weather turns bad at this point, because most of them have what it takes to survive these spells of rain and wind. When they were a lot younger, they had fewer reserves. Then, when a heavy rain spell stops (during these, they tilt their heads up to the sky with eyes closed, like the adults do, and open and close their bill – rain nibbling), they all start to shake off the water. This ranges from a head shake to a wings out, flapping, full body shake, water droplets flying everywhere – like a dog. If you picture the scene, it can be quite amusing/interesting: thousands of albatross chicks in the field, all sitting stock still under the rain; rain stops, and then those thousands of chicks all start individually shaking off. It makes for a lot of movement across the field, a lot of individual shakes. Your eye flits from one to another to another, and before you know it, you’ve watched 200 shake off in 30 seconds. These moments during the rains yesterday were also those in which I have seen the fewest adult albatross in the fields since arriving on the atoll. The rains also occasioned some laundry drama, which I had been lucky enough to avoid for many weeks. I like doing my laundry on a Friday afternoon, because I hate doing it in the precious weekend hours, and then it is normally nice and dry and crispy by Saturday midday. However, it is still now, as I write, hanging limply, sadly and wetly on the line. A day and a half later. Yesterday there was a moment where it was so nearly dry! Then, tragedy: sheets of rain. I now despair of having my nice crisp clothes ahead of the chick count. I had also washed some items for what I had planned to be the last time this weekend, and my butt-pack – if they all smell mouldy then I’m going to have the sad task of redoing a job I’d already done.
The albatross chicks are getting quite big, almost adult-size, and many have mantle feathers and secondaries and tertiaries, but no real primaries yet. They have nice white bellies and pantaloons, but their necks and heads are still down covered. They still have about a month left before they will be ready to fledge. Some of the mōlī (Laysan albatross) I have noticed, are starting to grow faint white patches on their faces, heralds of their cream-white faces come fledging time. The ka’upu (black-footed albatross) chicks are enormous, normally much bigger than the moli chicks, and whilst their beautiful glossy-dark feathers are coming in too, they actually seem to lose their down at a later age than do the moli chicks. When an adult turns up to feed, their chick gets SO excited, and throws their head back repeatedly in a begging call, which is a high-pitched squeak almost – it sounds like a squeaky playground swing. They worry at the parent’s bill, side to side to side, even chasing after them if they wander off, until the parent’s regurgitation reflex is triggered. Sometimes the parent will still go over to attack another chick, a behaviour which, as I have observed it over the months, seems more and more to be some sort of self-stimulus by the adults for regurgitation. For example, an adult who seems to be having a tough time regurgitating will often run over to a neighbouring chick, throttle them, then come back and be able to regurgitate for their own chick. There is also now a lot of flapping from the chicks when the breeze is up, and even some little running hops/flops. I wonder if they like the feeling of the wind under their long, long wings.
In other news, the ʻewaʻewa are swarming ever closer to camp. The last month or so has seen them congregating in different areas of the island, normally visible to a greater or lesser degree by us from camp when they are flying in their great sooty vortex, but I have not yet seen them alighting in these vortexes within sight of camp. Now, they are doing so, and the din is considerably louder. I wonder whether they will keep coming closer to camp within this week, and whether this will result in sooties alighting on our paths and our roofs etc. which we would then need to do something about. There are many on eggs by now as well on the runway and in different areas to the north and east of the island, but to see so many of them still flying around and coupling up tells me that there are tens of thousands of them on the island. In other chick news, we had our first brown ‘A (brown booby) chicks this week, along with pakalakala (greyback tern) chicks! More koloa pohaka (Laysan duck) broods were spotted, the masked ‘A (masked booby) chicks are growing up into big marshmallows, and the trees and thicker copses of naupaka are covered in manu-o-ku (white tern) eggs and chicks. You’ve really got to have your wits about you when you move under the HELFOE trees and even when you’re bushwhacking over the naupaka.
I had an interesting moment this week on the pier. It had been a fantastic sunset, classic orange sun descending into a calm lagoon – I had climbed up onto the pier shed roof to watch it. Right after the sun set, I lay on my back staring up at the sky, at the many species of bird criss-crossing my field of vision. The albatross zooming by on great wings, the sooty terns completing perfectly synchronous pair dances high up, the boobies coming in for the night, the Bonins starting to mass at the island, returning to feed their chicks. Then I had the idea of scooting backwards so that just my head dangled over the edge of the pier shed from the roof, upside down. I looked out at the sky and ocean like this, and it was striking to me how my perspective could fundamentally change how I interpreted the signals I was getting. The sea now looked like an undulating sky above me, and the sky looked like a great blue sea far, far beneath me. The few clouds, turned a reddish from the sunset, looked like they could be dark islands in this sea. I became so absorbed in this that I suddenly felt some vertigo, my body not understanding why it was not falling forward and down towards this sea – which of course, in reality, was the sky. Lesson: your perspective, i.e. the way in which you approach life or a problem, can fundamentally shape or change how you see that issue. If you actively seek to change your perspective, sometimes great answers, thoughts, lessons or experiences can be revealed to you.
We finished the front door painting this past week too. See the photo attached to this blog. It is quite beautiful and we are proud of it. Everyone did at least one animal/plant, and we hope that future crews add to it!
Well, bring on the last week of our winter 2024 season. I plan to go hard at the chick count, to get as many GRAs as possible under my belt, and to finish my time here with a bang.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin