Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving week.  This past week we said goodbye to Refuge Manager Sue Schulmeister and her husband Bob.  They've done a lot of great work out here the past couple of years.  We'll be getting a new manager out here in January.

We're starting our albatross monitoring this coming week.  We'll mark nests in 5 different plots and follow those nests to see how many of the eggs hatch and how many chicks end up fledging to determine reproductive success.

Egg laying for the Laysan and Black-footed albatross is in full swing.  This bird has an old aluminum band that isn't even readable anymore.  We'll have to see if we have time to replace it this season.  

 This is the old officer housing, which now is mostly the Thai worker housing.

We keep a few interesting artifacts in the seaplane hangar.  This is a section of the anti-submarine net that would keep out any unwanted submarines.  There are also a couple of the old tank turret pillboxes that were used as protected shooting spots for defensive forces in WWII.   

Since I hardly took any photos this week, I'm pulling one out of my older photos file.  This was a recently weened Hawaiian monk seal checking out the boat.