Happy New Year

Happy New Year!  It's been an eventful year out here, as usual, but I'm not going to recap, since you can just scroll down the page and do that anyway.  I was planning on starting out the year with a snorkel trip, but it was a bit too windy and a little gray today, so it was just a nice day off.  We swapped out a few of the albatross counters on the plane, and Dasha's vacation time was up, so she left on the last flight, too.  I hope it won't be too long before I can get back to D.C. to visit.  We also got 5 new Thai employees on the island.  Three of them will be helping out with the verbesina removal on Eastern Island, so it's nice to have them here.  They've got their work cut out for them.

We also did a Christmas Bird Count for the Audubon Society.  They do the count annually all across the mainland to get an idea of what birds are around.  It's nice that some of our albatross counters took their only day off from counting albatrosses to count all of the other species of birds on the island. 

Here's our Christmas tree complete with gifts underneath for our gift exchange on Christmas Eve.



 Here's Santa and his elves.  They look an awful lot like Dan, Richard, Nik, and Darlene.

One of my few artistic photos.  This is A2 playing the harmonica with the band, and a bit of messing with the camera zoom and a slow shutter speed.



 Dasha finally got to see the dolphins here at Midway on her fourth visit.  She took this photo on our way back from Eastern Island since I was driving the boat.

 Another shot of the spinner dolphins following us back to the harbor.

Just another sunset.



We finally got out to put Dasha's kayak training into use.  It was kind of windy, so we used the 2 seater so we could paddle into the wind a little easier.



This is a tagged Bristle-thighed curlew.  A group of them was tagged at their breeding grounds in Alaska.  This is the only one we've seen on Midway that's marked.