French Frigate Shoals (Kānemilohaʻi):Tern Island Blog: New Years on Tern Island

Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou!!!

An 'iwa (great frigatebird) welcomes you to Tern Island.

Theme for 2012? Sesame Street has nothing on us -- There are plenty of birds to count here!

We have lots and lots of albatross breeding now: about 3,000 ka'upu (black-footed albatross) nests and about 1,000 mōlī nests (Laysan albatross). Team Tern Awesome has been crazy busy counting these birds -- or more specifically, reading the auxillary bird bands ('aux bands') on albatross this past month. Every year in late December and early January, we read every aux band on about 10,000 albatross across the island. Then we do it again. Then again. Then yet again. We're in the midst of the 3rd sweep right now, and have already counted over 25,000 aux bands, and still have one more sweep to go!

Mōlī nesting in non-native grasses, Tern Island (Photo by Dakshina Marlier)

An overachieving ka'upu. This ambitious parent is brooding one egg, with two more in the nest. Where did he/she get those, do you wonder? :-) Photo by Paula L. Hartzell.

The point of all this counting is to determine what the breeding population of mōlī (Laysan albatross) and ka'ulu (black-footed albatross) is on Tern Island, as part of a mark-recapture study. The number of breeding albatross here is very important for two reasons: (1) because while Midway and Laysan Islands have much, much larger albatross populations than Tern, we are the ones who conduct most of the detailed biological monitoring. (2) Tern is also a more protected environment than Midway or Laysan, so may serve as an important refugia for seabird species nesting here -- Just like when the tsunami wiped out large portions of Midway's and Laysan's breeding grounds last year, but did not affect Tern Island. We also have the most dense population of nesting albatross in the Hawaiian Islands. (I don't know how the Japanese populations compare.)

The 'a maka'ele (masked boobies) are staking out territories now, and getting their nests set up. Right now we only have two nests on island, both with the customary 2 eggs. 'A maka'ele lay two eggs as 'insurance' when they lose one -- twins are rarely ever raised all the way to fledging. In this picture, the female is on the bottom left, and the male on the top left -- You can tell by his brighter beak. (That only works sometimes, though.) These are one of the few seabird species you can identify the sex of individuals: The males hiss and the females honk. The females also defend their offspring more viciously.

In December, we also participated in Audubon's annual Christmas bird count. Right now there are about 13,000 birds on Tern -- Relatively few compared to a summer population of about 1/4 million birds, due largely to high numbers of sooty terns in the summer. But that's still a whole lot of birds on an island about 930m x 120m.

Tern Island 2012 Christmas Bird Count	2007	2008	2010	2011
Short-tailed Albatross	0	0	0	0
Laysan Albatross	3369	3238	2466	2549
Black-footed Albatross	2983	3370	1580	5690
Black-footed Albatross x Laysan Albatross	1	1	1	1
Bonin Petrel	19	4	0	5
Wedge-tailed Shearwater	1	0	0	40
Tristram's Storm Petrel	16	31	0	50
Red-tailed Tropicbird	10	3	8	7
White-tailed Tropicbird	0	0	0	0
Masked Booby	86	125	55	220
Brown Booby	1	1	2	0
Red-footed Booby	1435	1572	1418	1907
Great Frigatebird	758	816	744	565
Lesser Frigatebird	1	0	0	0
Pacific Golden-Plover	127	84	63	175
Wandering Tattler	1	2	0	2
Bristle-thighed Curlew	0	0	0	4
Ruddy Turnstone	437	165	295	541
Sanderling	5	0	9	6
Cattle Egret	0	0	0	2
Dunlin	0	0	0	0
Ruff	0	0	0	0
Brown Noddy	54	319	11	571
Black Noddy	3441	1686	34	553
Blue-gray Noddy	1	0	0	0
White Tern	82	118	18	72
Sooty Tern	1	11	0	5
Gray-backed Tern	1	0	0	0
Laysan Finch	0	0	0	0
Laysan Duck	0	0	0	0
Northern Pintail	0	0	0	0
Bulwer’s Petrel	na	na	na	0
Christmas Shearwater	na	na	na	0
Vagrant: Northern Mockingbird	na	na	na	1
Total # Birds	12830	11546	6704	12966

We don't just count the birds, of course, although that's a really important part of our work here. Morgan Gilmour is satellite and GPS tagging ka'upu, mōlī, and 'a maka 'ele to see where they forage during nesting time. That will help us understand not only where they go to get their food, but how that is impacted by fishing, marine debris, climate, and other factors -- so we know whether we need to do more to help, or whether they're just doing fine on their own (which is best of course!).

Dan Rapp is working on quantifying the amount of plastic that seabirds ingest, paying special attention to mōlī and Tristram's storm petrel chicks, since his previous work suggests that these are the hardest hit by plastics. Sarah Youngren has set up acoustics monitoring equipment to see if we can use this method to reduce our impacts to the birds while monitoring, or even use this monitoring system for areas where humans can't stay! We're also doing some very initial testing of night vision (trail) cameras for burrow monitoring. Abram Fleishman is creating a new map of Tern Island, with natural, man-made, and science-important features -- which we really need badly because our maps are really out of date. Dakshina Marlier is working on developing some training materials for future volunteers on Tern Island, to help them appreciate the value and story of Hawaiian culture and history here. We're all working with several Hawaii classrooms, along with Barbara Mayer and NOAA's Wes Beyers, on special projects. Paula Hartzell is summarizing our work, and providing some statistical analyses of 30 years of monitoring for this year's annual report -- It's really important that we publish what we're doing, so people can actually use this information!

We're also working long hours trying to get our boats -- our newest engine is 9 years old -- running so we can do outer island surveys. We finally replaced the fuel pump, cleaned the starter and carburetors, replaced the manifold (which had to be sawed off, the bolts were so rusted), prop, bearings, and all fluids and filters on our whaler, the Mōlī -- and now the lower unit is toast. Mutiply that times a total of 5 outboards, the others of which are worse.... Aarg.....USFWS doesn't have funds to get us new engines, but you can only repair an engine with limited time and funds so many times. If anyone wanted to give us some tiller-driven 50hp Honda engines so we could actually get to the outer islands, we wouldn't complain!

Manu o Kū (white terns) are nesting as well -- but they nest year-round, so that's not unusual. Among the myriad of projects he's taken on, Dan Rapp is going to be tracking how many times individuals birds relay during the year. Photo by Abram Fleishman.

See if you can identify these following pictures, all by Abram F. (Nice photos, Abram!) Answers are waaaaaaay below; good luck!