Thank You, Veterans.

Thanks to all the veterans who have served or are still serving!  We'll have a small ceremony at the Navy Memorial here tomorrow.  I'll put up a photo next week.

It has been pretty windy for the last few days, which is bringing a lot of albatross in.  Every day the numbers are doubling.  It's good that all of the construction is wrapped up for the season.  There were quite a few people on island the last couple of days.  Most of our flights are every 2 weeks now, but every once in a while we have flights that stay here for 2 days.  That's when people like the termite inspectors, fuel inspectors, and anyone else who only needs a short time on island will come out.  So our hectic two days has passed for now.

 The field behind the new fuel farm is filling up with both Laysan and Black-footed albatross.

 There was a turtle nest on Eastern Island this summer.  This was only the fourth nest that we have documented at Midway.  Most Hawaiian green sea turtles nest at French Frigate Shoals.  We wait until it has had plenty of time to hatch and then dig it up and see how many eggs hatched.  It took a while to find the exact spot, but with help from Dale and Hoku, we finally found it.

There were 91 eggs in the nest, with 6 that didn't hatch.  That's in the normal range.  With all of the crabs, birds, fish, etc that are trying to get the hatchlings, there will probably be very few, if any, that will make it to adulthood.

 Konrad and Dale got the remote cameras on Eastern Island up and running so they had time to help out with other things, like digging up a turtle nest and installing a couple of aerators in two of our wetlands.  The photo shows one in Brackish pond.  We're hoping that the extra oxygen in the water will reduce the number of botulism cases in Laysan ducks.

 One thing I've been doing for years is cutting up my plastic 6-pack holders for just this reason.  This Laysan duck got entangled in one.

It took a little while to catch him, but we netted him and removed the plastic.