Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Almost the real 4th

Tomorrow is a day off as it probably is for most of you. Really I don't know why they bother giving days off here because they really aren't much different than working days. It is kind of hard work carrying around spray packs and spraying verbesina, nightshade, and other weeds and cutting down ironwoods, but it's feels good to do some hard work now and then. Last night was kind of funny. We have these spiders here called "cane spiders". The biggest one I've seen is about 5 inches across, and they are really fast. When I walked in my door last night with my flashlight (no streetlights here, only flashlights) I saw a huge cane spider running on my wall toward me. I dropped my flashlight, ran in the kitchen and turned on the light. When I went back to look, I found a tiny little 1/4 inch spider on the lens of the flashlight. It was just the shadow on the wall that was huge. I'm glad my roommates weren't home to laugh at me.

The NOAA ship left yesterday, and our barge full of supplies (now empty) left today, so it'll start to settle down a little bit.

Here's Angela (a visiting grandaughter of a resident) giving a scratch to an albatross fledgling. Only about 1 in 15 of them lets you walk right up and scratch them. Most of them will if they get used to you though. Only about 1 in 10,000 are actually mean. So with somewhere in the neighborhood of over 250,000 chicks, there are only about 25 mean ones on the island (I've only found one so far).

1 comment:

khintze said...

Happy 4th of July Pete. Great spider story. Sue and I read your blog pretty consistently.