Sunday, September 23, 2012

Coast Guard

We had more visitors this week.  The US Coast Guard Cutter Kukui came in for 5 days to work on the buoys marking our channel.  We also had some Coast Guard visitors fly in on a C-130 for a meeting and a tour.  The days are still fairly quiet around here without the albatross around, but the Bonin petrels are back and are fairly loud at night.  Work is winding down on our lead paint remediation project for this year and we've got a lot of people leaving on the plane this week, so I took them out for a snorkel trip this afternoon. It was great as usual.   

 Here's a photo of the USCG Cutter Kukui. 

 Here's the C-130 landing with our visitors with the Kukui working on a buoy in the background.

You might recognize Jan Vozenilek as one of the people filming the Midway movie with Chris Jordan.  He's out here on a separate project for the Smithsonian Institution.  He also helped me check Eastern Island seeps for sick or dead Laysan ducks. So far we haven't had any new sick or dead since our big outbreak last week.

 There were a lot of Laysan ducklings this year, so we've got a lot of them in the seeps right now.  It's great to see an endangered species doing well.

The Wedge-tailed shearwater chicks are still fluffy but getting pretty big.

 The White terns were flocking around me today, and I managed to get one or two in focus photos.  It's not easy though.
 
 The lagoon was looking the same as usual this afternoon.  You have to like blue to live out here.

Here's a Moorish idol swimming around the coral.  These are difficult to get pictures of because they are kind of shy.

5 comments:

Dina J said...

Your beautiful pictures remind me that I really need to take a vacation!

Pete Prellwitz said...

Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Many thanks, Pete.

George Boorujy said...

Hi Pete! I love your blog. So great. Stumbled upon it when researching sooty terns. I'm an artist, and also have a blog about a project I'm doing about garbage and pelagic birds - www.nypelagic.com
Here's some of my other work too:
http://www.ppowgallery.com/exhibition.php?id=103

Hope all's well!
George

Pete Leary said...

Thank you all for the compliments.

And I like the art George, I couldn't see all of your blog pics because of my poor internet though. What I could see was really nice. I'll try it again on a good internet day, if I have any.

Thomas Churchyard said...

Hi Pete,

I work for BirdLife International and would like to ask permission to use your photograph of the three common white terns?

We are looking for photos of this style to use for the front cover of a document looking at seabirds in the Pacific.

If you could email me at Thomas.churchyard@birdlife.org that would be great.

Best Regards

Thomas Churchyard