Midway, Part V

Eastern Island. The yellow flowers are verbesina, an invasive plant they're trying to control.

Before the group split up and I got to go check out the beach, we went to look at one of the duck seeps with Laysan ducks.



Part of our visiting group consisted of avian disease specialists, there to check out the Laysan ducks and talk about a botulism outbreak that happened a few months ago. There used to be about 400 Laysan ducks in the world. A researcher took about 40 of them, brought them to Midway, and they're now flourishing there (with the exception of the ones who died from botulism). The happy news is that no one found any sick ducks on this trip!



Now for some random bird pictures. I'll label each underneath.



Above is a bristle thighed curlew in flight. Mom, Dad, and I saw a couple of these standing still at James Campbell here on Oahu. Take a look at its long, curved beak.



This is a red footed booby in the naupaca. It's not the best picture of him, but I think his face is hilarious. Naupaca is a native plant. Nene, the Hawaiian goose, eat the naupaca berries. The berries also make excellent defoggers for snorkel masks.



These are sooty terns in flight. Apparently Alfred Hitchcock recorded the sounds of sooty terns to use as the bird noises in his film, The Birds.



Two white terns and one sooty tern.



White tern in flight, closer up.



Black footed albatross. We were pretty close to this one. Then he decided it was time to readjust and waddle away.



These guys have a pretty hilarious walk. Everyone on Midway says it looks like Richard Nixon walking. Their wings are hunched up by their heads and they waddle away, swaying a little from side to side.



Apparently this bird is the holy grail. A short tailed albatross. There are about two hundred living on an island off of Japan, but there's only one that hangs out on Midway. Click on the picture. From the left, there are two birds standing one in back of the other, then one more, then the short tailed albatross. You're seeing his back. This is the only actual bird in the picture; the rest are decoys. In the hopes that he would stick around and maybe others would come, they've put up decoys and have a solar powered iPod out there that plays the call. Pretty cool.

Well, that almost concludes Wednesday on Midway...there's still some WWII stuff to look at, but I'm going to put that in a separate post. Thursday involved more history, and the first Laysan albatross to return to the island.