4 May (193 days on island)
Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another installment of my weekly blog on Hōlanikū for the winter 2024 season. You don’t have many of these left to read now, as my time on the atoll is running out. There will be only two more blog entries delivered to you from the island, as I am expected to depart these shores on the 20th of May. Then, I will write one more whilst I’m on the boat back to Hawai’i where I reflect on the season as a whole and on actually leaving the island, and where I give you any last insights and fun updates about what happened on our journey back. I have really enjoyed writing these up for you every week, and I hope you have also liked them.
This week we treated 62 acres. The first week of our 7th rotation around the island. Crazy eh! I am now properly saying goodbye to some areas of the island because I will not see them again before I leave. The first week of our rotations is always quite a heavy one for acreage but overall it is quite easy terrain-wise, because it does not include naupaka-heavy GRAs. We also get pretty much one whole treatment day without burrows (amazing) when we treat the runway. So that always puts a spring in my step. We all found fewer invasive grasses growing in grass-heavy areas than we did last rotation, so that is encouraging, and we hope that with our intensive treatment programme this season that we have helped to really knock them back and deplete their seedbank. I also found still fewer verbesina sprouts in my normal verb spots than last rotation, which itself normally saw us find fewer verb sprouts than the previous one. So I also have hopes that our season really made a difference re verb in particular. Furthermore, the huge Cassytha infestations that we used to find at the start of the season and even into the mid-season are no more. There is of course still Cassytha out there, but the vast majority of the time when we find it now, it covers a few dozen square feet at the most rather than the hundreds of square feet one infestation could cover when we first got here. I often find little handfuls of it in the sweet alyssum which I can rip up no problem. I am pretty badly allergic to the sweet alyssum (lob) and it gives me hives, sneezes and a runny nose as soon as I start tearing it up. Uncomfortable, but it is what it is, and the work needs to get done regardless. So, whilst our progress on the island is not as readily visible as seeing large areas of cleared weeds for example (except the clearings where there used to be enormous HELFOE trees that we cut down with handsaws), we know based on observation of sprouts and based on numbers that we are making a difference.
Onto the natural history front! Last weekend after I wrote to you all, Nadia found an awesome creature down on the beach, one that I (and Tlell) have been wanting to see for a very long time. A Blue Dragon Nudibranch! These little fellows are remarkable in both their appearance and their habits: they are an electric blue colour, with large frond-like appendages, and they are formidable little hunters, as they eat Portuguese man o’ wars! Tlell came up to the bunkhouse shouting my name in excitement, and I burst out of my room to see her with this nudi in a bottle cap in her hand with some saltwater. I grabbed my dissecting microscope and we both rushed down to the beach, Jacob in tow. We filled a petri dish with saltwater and all gazed in wonder, joy and excitement down at the little hunter. Close up under the scope, you could see the little bubbles inside the nudi (these were visible through the translucent ventral skin) which they blow to make bubble rafts for themselves. We could see the eyes, the movement, and much more detail in the pigmentation of the animal than we could with the naked eye. The nudi was truly a wonderful blue, but, like the man o’wars I’d looked at under my scope, the blues were made up of an infinitesimal number of cells with different hues of blue and purple, with cells along the back that shimmered a silvery colour, like someone had brushed silverdust onto the nudi’s back. The animal was so breathtakingly beautiful, full of so many details and so much complexity, even though it was only about the length of my thumbnail. I attach a photo I managed to take of the nudi with my phone though the microscope eyepiece. I love nudibranchs and I am always reminded of my dad when I see them, because he is a frustrated marine invertebrate zoologist (turned out a medical doctor and pathologist). I am so grateful that this atoll has provided me with the chance to see so much, from the minuscule nudies, to the charismatic macrofauna (albatross!), to the immense weather patterns, cloud-towers, lightning-forks, that govern the skies. I am also grateful that I myself am able to feel so much wonder, joy and excitement at even small things like a nudi, for without these emotions, I believe life would be devoid of colour.
This week saw more exceptionally deep, sandy burrows. I have found that some of the worst burrows are inland in the vast kawelu fields. In these areas, you have no choice but to step in the small sandy clearings between kawelu clumps, mostly because birds tunnel under the kawelu and you don’t want to crush them, and many of these are Akihikeʻehiʻale (Tristram storm petrel) burrows which are very small and fragile, often consisting of only tunnels of kawelu-grass itself rather than going fully underground. So you are stepping around kawelu clumps, but the Bonin and ‘ua’u kani (wedge-tailed shearwater) burrows go under these open areas, and inevitably you fall through to the cavernous spaces beneath. You need to have your wits about you constantly, and I have a special way of walking now, which is somewhere between the way an American woodcock sways as it walks, and the sand-walk in Dune (Frank Herbert). This helps me sound out the ground before I fully commit to the step, and it also helps me be more balanced if I do end up falling through to a burrow. All of my weight will not go down onto the contents of the burrow, thus posing less risk to birds if they are underneath me – a tactic which I found served me well when the nunulu (Bonin petrels) had eggs. Another side of this burrow business is that as the albatross chick season has worn on, I have trained my eye to detect yet another anomaly as I visually sweep an area for weeds, either in my direct line of vision or in my periphery: buried albatross chicks. Since the island is riddled with burrows, something I have often found whilst out treating is that an albatross chick has gotten stuck in a burrow as it collapsed. I have found them buried up to their necks sometimes. This is not a very obvious thing though, especially when you’re sweeping an area full of the same shapes and colours. But my eye is now good at detecting when an albatross chick shape doesn’t look normal. At that point, I dig them out, and put them back on the ground surface. Some have been buried too long and are in bad shape, but others do survive once you unbury them, where otherwise they would have met certain death. It makes me feel good to help individuals like this.
In other news, many of the albatross chicks, especially the mōlī (Laysan albatross) chicks, are starting to get their graduation (fledging) hair-dos. Their faces are gradually whitening, and the downy fuzz is falling away from the bright white and shiny dark grey feathers beneath. Similar is happening to the ka’upu (black-footed albatross) chicks, which are generally larger than the mōlī chicks, but since their feathers are all dark, the contrast with the patchy down is lessened. I feel proud of them and their parents. Many of these birds I have observed since they were laid as eggs. They are precious to me. One of my biggest regrets is that I will not get to follow them to the end of their journey on Hōlanikū, that is, when they fledge. That time sadly lies just outside of the timespan of my season here. I will miss it by a month. I hope to one day return, and to witness the entire breeding cycle.
I saw a funny thing last night. As I walked out of the main house with my film camera to capture some albatross action in the golden hour, I looked over and saw a pair of adult mōlī playing with something small and fuzzy near the path. I rushed over and sure enough, these curious birds were toying with a baby nunulu (Bonin petrel)! As I walked over, one of the albatross pulled the nunulu chick out of the shallow scrape it was hiding in by the wing, and then started trying to preen it! The other albatross began to join in. I find it fascinating how these birds are in turn so fascinated by and drawn to any small fuzzy bird. It reminds me of when the albatross chicks were all still very small and being left alone for the first time, and how many times I watched unemployed birds try to sit on them and ‘play house’ with them. They obviously have very strong parenting instincts which draw them to anything that looks remotely like an albatross chick. In any case, Nadia and I did rescue the poor nunulu chick, which was being somewhat manhandled by these two albatross. I did worry that they would slice the tiny chick open. We returned it to its burrow, which Nadia dug out slightly more so that the albatross couldn’t pull the chick out of it again.
Down at the beach for sunset, Tlell and I watched an adult mōlī attempt to cough up something very large for its chick. There were dozens of attempts, and whatever it was, was large and solid enough to be visible as a huge lump that went up and down the adult bird’s neck. We both wondered what it was and whether it was plastic, but unfortunately we never got to see whether it eventually coughed it up for the chick. Together we walked a little ways, and commented on how so many of the chicks who had previously been raised in the naupaka line had moved down the beach towards the water. The day, and week, was finished off by a brilliant show from the sun and clouds. It had been a sunbeam evening, with great bands of light piercing the clouds and streaming down to the ocean, but for a few minutes, a round sort of hole opened up in the clouds and let the golden brilliance of the sun through. It looked truly like a window into another world, into heaven, so bright that one could not look directly into it. In my imagination, it is through such a portal that albatross first came to us on this earth. As we watched, the portal slowly closed, and all was grey cloud once more.
Aloha,
Isabelle Beaudoin