A Day Late

I decided to wait a day for my blog, since I wanted to get a few more photos and it was a holiday.

This week we have some new people on island.  We have some archeologists here to look around some of our buildings that are going to have lead paint remediation around them.  Since lead paint has been peeling off of buildings since they put the cable houses here in 1903, they'll have to remediate a lot of the soil around those buildings.  The archeologists are just making sure that historical artifacts are preserved before the work is done. 

Michelle and Chris with the USGS, came to band the Laysan ducks.  Many of the bands put on a few years ago, aren't readable anymore.  Hopefully, they'll change out most of those old ones and band a lot of our younger ducks so we can get a better idea of our duck health and population.

Other than that, it's been hot for October.  It made digging the well on Eastern Island a bit more difficult, but since I'm not out in the field all day, I kind of like it that way.   

 Here's the Gulfstream IIB bringing our mail (and people and supplies).

 This is one of the cable houses that the archeologists are digging around.  I don't think they've found too much interesting stuff yet.

 This Laysan duck was standing just outside the garage on Friday, so I took some photos of his band.  This band actually started out green with white letters.  Now, it's just white.  I hope Michelle finds him again to reband him.

 We went back to finish the well on Eastern Island.  We didn't get it as deep as we wanted, because the sand kept caving in, but hopefully it's deep enough.

 Done!  (Except for putting in the pump, running the hose, putting up the solar panels, and all that.)

This big plastic thing will be a little duck pond.  We'll have a rain catching roof above it to keep it full of water.  These "guzzlers" are a lot less likely to have botulism problems.  We'll be using the new well to fill that big tank behind.

 I was out riding around today and saw some White-tailed tropicbirds flying around the orchard.  We only have a few of these around and the only way I notice them, apart from all of the other thousands of white birds that fly around, is to hear them.  They sound almost like a Red-tailed tropicbird, but different enough to notice. 

They are really pretty birds.  They nest in the ironwood trees, unlike the red-tailed tropicbirds, that nest on the ground.