Sunday, July 29, 2012

Sette Returns

The Oscar Elton Sette returned this week.  They are picking up the monk seal crews that have been monitoring the seals on most of the islands up the chain.  They also dropped off a couple of people from Tern Island who'll be flying out next week.  Welcome to Midway Sarah and Dan!  We've still got a lot of people on island with the work crews being here.  There aren't that many details to tell you about this week so I'll just get to the photos.

 The Oscar Elton Sette is pulling back into the pier on Thursday morning.

 This excavator is getting some sand from the beach near the cargo pier to fill in areas where sand was removed for lead paint remediation.

There are few albatross chicks left, but those that are left are usually trying to find some shade. 

The chicks are thirsty so when it rains, they try to catch as much as they can. 

 This is one of the last Bonin petrel fledglings walking by a Laysan albatross chick that wasn't so lucky.

Now the bird population is low enough that the planes can fly in the daytime.  It gets back to Honolulu about 3 p.m. now which is a lot better than 1 a.m.

6 comments:

JK said...

HDR on the first two photos? Loving the effect, especially in the top photo.

Pete Leary said...

Thanks. Yep, they're HDR. They turned out well.

Pete Prellwitz said...

What amount of corpse cleanup is there, Pete? I should imagine even the smallest percentage of chicks dying would number pretty high.

Gruesome topic, I know, but I was curious.

Pete Leary said...

On an average year, about 30% of our albatross chicks die, so out of 400,000, that's about 120,000. We only take them away from our houses and work areas to keep the smell and flies down. They get piled over near the harbor. The rest are just be eaten by the bugs.

Justin Edward Ellis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Justin Edward Ellis said...

Hi Pete, this is Justin Ellis on the Sette. I like the photo you took of the ship, any chance you would share the full size version to use for ship's media? We could put a caption on it to ensure people know who took it.

Let me know if you're interested.

V/R,
Justin