This is one of those dreaded "what I did on vacation" reports, and it has its
share of both "R" and "C" birding talk, so be forewarned and delete now if
bothered by it all.

Hawaii:

Clarice and I just spent two weeks on Hawaii and one on Midway. Hawaii was
ostensibly to go to a vireya rhododendron convention, Midway was to see the
place before it gets too crowded (with people) if it ever does.

One week was at Volcano, and we got there exactly on the day Kilauea decided
to change its eruption pattern, stopping the lava flow to the ocean
and spurring the Park service to close some of the roads. Had to get our
kicks with the earthquakes, instead. Didn't even see a Nene, however did
have some good birding at the end of the Mauna Loa strip road. Between there,
Manuka State Wayside, and the Saddle we did spot most of the common endemics;
pueo, omao, elepaio, amakihi, and iiwi, as well as some interesting
introduced birds like red billed leiothrix. Also good long looks at a
peregrine eating a bird while it (the falcon) hovered above in a strong wind.
Also, as you drive south on the Saddle Road, just north of the north boundary
of the military reservation, there is dirt road going east into a mamane
forest, which was all in bloom. Saw quite a few palila in the trees. They
were our best "ticks" of this bird-golfing trip (and I do remember what they
all looked like; also I especially remember several minutes of watching an
iiwi belt out all sorts of ludicrous calls from that fiery bill, before
rocketing off to chase away an amakihi). We hoped for, but never saw, a wild
hawaiian hawk. Settled for meeting one at the zoo, which I got to carry
around, pet and generally chat about the weather with. Wonderfully gentle
raptor; much easier to carry on a bare hand than my parrot.

Also SCUBA diving, and we both recommend the manta ray night dive off the
Kona Surf.

Midway:

For anybody who doesn't already know, the Navy now only has four people on
Midway, and will be off of it by June. The base operation contracter will go
with them. Right now the main activity going on is a concentrated haz waste
cleanup, with lots of heavy equipment pulling fuel tanks out of the ground,
flattening buildings, and cleaning up the lead paint.

Fish and Wildlife has the place now, and will be sole proprietors after June.
Mostly because of the historical value, they have contracted with Midway
Phoenix Corp (a sub-group of a company that flies a lot of government folk
around) to be a concessioner. Phoenix handles passenger flights, and will
take over the galley, rooms (which are nicely refurbished suites in the BOQ)
and so forth. They in turn are subcontracting to a fishing and a SCUBA
outfit. Right now there are about 300 people on the island, mostly cleaning
it up and supporting that, and they are allowing 30 visitors a week. When
June comes they want to make it a total of 150 people on the island at a time
including both tourists and Fish and Wildlife staff and support.

We signed up with Oceanic Society (which is working under F & W to bring
out ecotourists) to go out and do a week long stint with the bird monitoring
projects. Needless to say there are a lot of long term questions about bird
conditions that can be helped by doing a lot of simple eco-chores, like
counting nestlings every few days in marked out plots. We figured it would be
fun and it was, also educational and wierd.

The Oceanic program is just getting started. They have some very dedicated
people out there, who have their hands full trying to deal with setting up
and ecotour system in the midst of a wildlife refuge-- which seems to be so
far a certain clash of cultures. I don't know of any place else where F & W
has gone in to any similar sort of arrangement, and it shows. For instance
one lady, who volunteered there for years before signing on with Oceanic, is
hoping for a permit to bleach mark and follow monk seals, which are big and
don't seem to like people. While we were there her permit still had not come
through (does F & W really want tourists, however well intentioned, crawling
up to endangered monk seals and bleaching numbers in to their fur-- not that
it hurts the seal but it could hurt the people and is a disturbance-- that
sort of thing). As far as the bird monitoring was concerned, what we got were
a lot of simple projects. They consisted of counting Laysan and blackfooted
albatross chicks in 20 meter plots, checking marked trees for black noddy
nests and for nesting white terns, and daily scanning of a fresh water
catchment pond on the edge of the runway for itinerant gulls, ducks, and
shorebirds.

It was fine, but for a little more challenge we took on improving on the maps
they had of the nests in the plots, which were really poor. (I'm not sure
why you need an accurate map of albatross nests in a 20 meter plot, but they
said they did. Was sort of interesting though, we found that in the most
crowded plot, which had about 100 nests, about 40% of the plot had no nests
at all. In short even in a small area in a roughly homogeneous looking field
of solid birds they were clustered in small dense groups).

By far the most challenging part was trying to ID the four gulls that are
hanging out on the island right now. One adult glaucous, two immatures that
were probably herring gulls, and two immatures that were beyond us-- but I
brought back some pictures of one and showed them to Dennis who figured it
was probably a slaty back, based on photos in one of his guidebooks. We
counted Pacific golden plovers every day, and had some tattlers, a common
snipe, and so forth. Also two of the Aleutian version of green wing teals,
both males.

Some folk were out from USGS (that is, NBS in its new incarnation) mapping
out plots to mark nests of chicks that they were taking blood samples from
for lead content analysis, and I bothered them a while. They were mapping
the nests with differential GPS and downloading it all in to arcview, which
really seemed like overkill but hey, its fun. I'm really not sure what a
sub-meter accuracy location of a nest will get you when the chicks are about
to start wandering all over the place anyway. Also a lady from Tacoma, Jean
Radesovich, was out there running a closed circuit TV down bonin petrel
burrows. They are feisty when you stick a tube in their face underground.

One project that was just our speed was watching mynas to see if they would
go down in to the petrel burrows. There are a few, not many, mynas on the
island and they have taken to eating abandoned albatross eggs. Jean was
finding pecked petrel eggs outside of some of the burrows she was monitoring
and F & W started wondering if the mynas were learning to go down burrows for
petrel eggs. This project involved concentrated sitting on chairs in the
shade watching two or three mynah do their things while the albatrosses came
by and played with our notes, my toes, and Clarice's hat.

The really wierd thing about Midway is the ambience. F & W has finally
censused the place as having 380,000 nesting pairs of Laysan albatrosses (on
all three islands) and a smaller (I don't remember the number) amount of
black-footeds, along with all the unmated hangers on. Add all the chicks and
its a whole lot of birds. You feel inferior. You start saying "excuse me"
to them. You watch out for them because they use the roads as clear strips
for landing runs and can take you down from a bicycle. The "teenagers" are
always dancing and mewing, and then they walk over to you as you sit there
with your camera and they look back. They walk down the halls and sit in the
doorways (both inside and outside). Then add all the white (fairy) terns that
flutter around your head and will land on you, the noddys, the red-tailed
tropicbirds that were waving there tails side to side seductively-- its
overwhelming. And a short tailed albatross to boot.

I'm glad we went, and I hope it makes it as a going concern (I wonder, as it
is hard to get to and even with allowing visitors I wonder if the F & W
restrictions will make it unprofitable for the consessioners.) On that note,
as we flew in the plane hit an albatross which scrunched the nose cone, then
our landing gear warning light came on. We landed ok, but some of us at
least were properly petrified, and to get off the plane on to the runway in
the dark, with all the firetrucks and the ambulance surrounding us with their
lights shining on us, was a little like being in the X-files. Be interesting
to see if it makes it as a tourist spot. Take the trip soon, while its still
a little bit like and adventure.
-------------------------------------
Name: Jerry Broadus
jbroadus at seanet.com
901-16th. St S.W.
Puyallup, Wa. 98371
206-845-3156
02/25/97
20:19:12