Thank You Veterans

Thanks to all veterans who've served at Midway, those I served with during my 6 years in the Navy, and those who've served anywhere in the world.  We'll be having a small ceremony tomorrow at the Navy Memorial.

This is one of the few photos I have from my time on the USS-Honolulu (SSN-718).  I'm down in the engineroom of the sub out in front of this battle group.  I remember the crew up in the control room were worried that if the engines stopped, we'd be in trouble.  We were moving pretty fast in this photo, and the carrier was closer than it looks.  I enjoy my view a little better nowadays than I did in back then.

More of the albatross have been appearing every day.  We haven't seen any nests yet, but it won't be long now.  The weather is cooling down, but we've still been having perfect days.  Not hot, but sunny with a bit of a breeze. 

This is our Navy Memorial on Veteran's Day, 2007.  The big gooney bird is no longer there.  It had been getting eaten by termites and damaged by weather, so after years of patching, we finally sent it off to Honolulu to get a copy made.  We just have to wait until we can get money for it from donors. 

 A group from NOAA and the State of Hawaii came out to learn more about Midway.  One stop was the monument to Henderson Field on Eastern Island.  We lost our visitor program, but we'll still sometimes get visits from our monument management partners.

 The group got to see what a great job the verbesina removal crew is doing over there.  This area had been covered with verbesina a few months ago.  The crew had to clean some trails so they'll be able to move around the island when the albatross start nesting everywhere.  Don't worry, they still have plenty of nesting space even with the cleared trails.

 The group also helped plant native bunch grass and 'aki'aki grass.

 This young Short-tailed albatross visited us last year.  It's come back again seeing if there's any other Short-tails to meet.  We haven't seen it interacting with our 3 usual resident birds.

A Black-footed albatross with verbesina in the background.

Albatross are coming back

A lot of albatross are showing up now that the wind has shifted from the south to north.  I think it was tougher for them to fly back here against the wind.  We've seen 2 Short-tailed albatrosses so far, the one that sits by the runway, and the male of the pair on Eastern Island.  More Black-footed and Laysan albatross are showing up every day.  

We had a small Halloween party last week at Capt. Brooks' Tavern.  Nothing to crazy, since it was a Wednesday night, and our island population is pretty low right now.  A few people dressed up, but I didn't take many pics. 

 

The Short-tailed albatross sits with 3 decoys, and a few Black-footed albatross.  The real bird is the one on the right.
 

 One of the early Laysan albatrosses gets a good spot before the crowd gets in.

Here's a White tern and one of the old abandoned barracks buildings.  Speaking of White terns, we're still feeding about 10 of the chicks that we rescued from the lead paint project.

 A big net washed up on the shore of Eastern Island. 

A Brown booby was sitting on the beach near the net.
 

A Black-footed albatross flies by.  I just noticed I put up a lot of bird photos this week.  Next week I'll try to mix it up a bit more.

No Tsunami & Albatrosses are Back

You may have heard that there was a couple of big earthquakes off the coast of British Columbia, and that there was a major evacuation in Hawaii for a possible tsunami.  We got the word out here too, so it was an evening of moving heavy equipment to high ground and waiting on the 3rd floor of Charlie Barracks.  We had the news playing on TV, and were watching our tide gauge data online.  We don't have direct access, so we just had to watch it on the NOAA website.  We got the all clear about 12:30 pm and all got to go home.  As you can see by the screen capture below, we really didn't get much.  I checked a few of the beaches today, and there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary, which was alright with me. 

Here is the data from the tide station, taken from NOAA's web page:

 http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/data_menu.shtml?stn=1619910 Sand Island, Midway Islands, USA&type=Tide Data

You can see the variation after 08:00 on the chart.  You can click on it and make it bigger.

 The island population waited in the hallway and rooms of Charlie Barracks.  The emergency lights were only on shortly while the generators were swapped.  We had power for most of the wait.

 This is the NOAA tide station out at the end of the harbor.  It's just the 2 white tubes and the little shed.

 I forgot to mention last week that the Black-footed albatrosses started coming back.  There aren't too many of them around yet, but there will be soon.  The Laysan albatross have not returned yet.

 No special story with this photo, I just liked the bird in the Sweet Alyssum.

Here's a screen capture from Google Maps.  As I mentioned last week, you can go in the garage at the office.  You can also go into the Transportation building.  It's cool to play around with if you have the bandwidth, which I really don't.  You can make this photo a bit bigger by clicking on it, or just look at Google Maps.

Canada Earthquake & Midway Tsunami

To all friends, family, aquaintences, and anyone just interested in Midway, we're all fine here.  Our tide gage only showed a rise of inches.  We'll check in the morning to make sure nothing actually happened.  We just had a nice wait up on the 3rd floor of Charlie Barracks.  I'll do a real blog post later, because it's 1 am here and the internet is really slow with everyone trying to contact their families.

Google Maps

Sorry I'm a day late, but I really didn't have a whole lot to tell you about.  I've just been busy working and not taking many photos. 

Last night I heard that "Street View" is now available on Google Maps for Midway.  It doesn't look like they have Eastern or Spit Islands on yet, but you can even go into the garage at the office. I searched for "Midway Atoll" and "Midway Islands" and it got to the right place, but "Midway Island" brought me to Virginia.  So for the comment last week about more photos of buildings and housing, you can now take a virtual tour of Midway.

Nine Greater white-fronted geese flew in this week (only 4 in this photo so don't take too much time trying to count all 9). They are all juveniles.  The last one we had was in 2007 on Eastern Island, which you can see a photo of if you go back to Dec. of 2007 on my blog.

The Brown noddies don't like the geese and swarm around them when they fly.

Here's a view of Sand Island from Eastern Island.  I don't have a lot of photos this time, so you can have some time to poke around on Google Maps.

Kahana

The Kahana was back through this week dropping off supplies and bringing people to Kure, Laysan, and French Frigate Shoals.  They had some big waves at Laysan so couldn't actually drop anyone or anything off, so they'll have to swap crews and get supplies onto the island on the way back down the chain.  All of these island crews will be on their respective islands until March or so. 

 The Kahana is parked at the tug pier at Midway.

 Here's the crew going out to Kure.  The returning people will be here until Thursday, when they'll fly out.  Except the guy in the maroon shirt.  That's Jim and he's Kahana crew.

 This has been the view out my back window since I moved in. 

 The contractors took out that shed that was pretty useless anyway.

 I like my view much better now.

My little Olympus camera has some interesting effects settings.  This is the sun going down behind some ironwood trees with invasive bush beardgrass in the foreground.  Most of my different than usual photos lately have been with this camera.

Busy and Quiet

It's a bit busier around here without volunteers.  It has also been a bit quieter since our island population dropped a bit with the departure of our work crews. There's actually not much to talk about this week.  No medevacs, no emergency landings, no wildlife trouble, nice weather.  I even waited an extra day to post my blog in case something came up.  Nothing did, so here are some pictures.

 You can barely see one of the old bunkers behind all of the verbesina.

 Too bad the verbesina is so invasive.  It would be kind of pretty if it didn't spread so much.

A Laysan duck gets ready to flap its wings.

This is an abandoned fuel tank at our old fuel farm.  Our tanks there have been empty for years, but we haven't had the funds to remove them yet.

 This Red-tailed tropicbird chick should be ready to fly out of here any day now.

We had Bingo up at Captain Brooks on Saturday night.  I won one game.  The one where the person who doesn't get any numbers wins.

No More Volunteers

We said goodbye to our last volunteer group for the foreseeable future.  I hope it won't last too long.  I'll be a lot busier cleaning seeps and looking for sick or dead Laysan ducks and all sorts of other projects that I got major help with from the volunteers.  More outside time will be ok with me though.

Jan found some good examples of dead albatross chicks filled with plastic, so look for an exhibit in the Smithsonian in another year or two!  Pretty much all of the dead chicks have some plastic, but he was looking for ones where you could see the plastic without digging through the bird.  That way the Smithsonian can display a bird just like it was found on the island.

 Here's Jan and one of the dead albatross chicks that we collected.

 A lot of migratory ducks have been flying in this past week.  Here is a pair of Northern shovelers in one of the seeps.

 Every year we get a some Widgeons (American & Eurasian), in the foreground, and we get a lot of Northern Pintails, like the one in the background.

 The orphaned white terns that we've been feeding are flying around, but still cannot get their own food yet.  Most of them should be gone in another week or two.

Thanks volunteers Sarah and Ryan, and of course thanks to all volunteers who've been out here over the years.  Midway is a much better place for having you.

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.

Back From Vacation

I had a good time on vacation the past few weeks.  I was in Copenhagen, Denmark for about a week and Czech Republic for a week.  It's a long trip from Midway to Copenhagen though.  I'm posting a couple of vacation pics today.

Things haven't slowed down around here, even though all of the albatross are gone.  The NOAA Ship Hi'ialaki showed up today with some researchers and a film crew.  We've had quite a few planes stop by to get fuel on their way across the Pacific, and we've had some sick and dead Laysan ducks from botulism that have been keeping us busy looking for more.  We one of our volunteers left while I was off island, thanks for the help Liz, and a new volunteer came to help out for about 6 weeks, welcome to Midway, Sarah.  Since our volunteer program will be suspended for a while, we'll be losing our volunteers in 2 weeks with no replacements. I hope that won't last too long, because the volunteers do a lot of work!

 This is what the Parade field looks like now with no albatrosses.

 It was kind of a gray day today, but the water is still blue.  The dolphins were splashing around the beach a couple hours before, but I didn't have my camera then.

 I got a photo of the Hi'ialakai pulling in to Midway while I was on Eastern Island this morning.

A US Coast Guard C-130 came in earlier this week to pick up a couple of people that were dropped off from a passing Coast Guard ship.



 This is Copenhagen, Denmark.  Pretty much every person that goes there takes this picture.

 They had a nice sand sculpture area across from the Opera House.

 Here is the Powder Tower in Prague, Czech Republic.  It was built in 1475 and was used to store gunpowder in the 1600's. 

This is the National Museum in Prague.  I have a lot of photos of buildings in Prague, but since this is a Midway blog, I guess 2 are enough.