New Crew on Tern

Welcome to our new crew on Tern!  The Kahana arrived on Monday with the new summer crew:  Summer Manager Meg Duhr Schultz, and volunteers Catherine Fox, Ryan Potter, and Megan Juran.  The new and old crew will work together over the next 10 days, passing the torch.  The winter crew will be leaving when the Kahana comes through on its return trip to Honolulu, and Meg will be taking over the blog.

Offloading supplies and getting new crew:  Left to right:  Dan Rapp, Ryan Potter, Morgan Gilmour, and Abram Fleishman.  Photo by Sarah Youngren.

Abram Fleishmman and Megan Juran stack milk in the food room.  All food must be labeled with date of arrival and stored in its proper place.  This food will last the crew -- plus folks from NOAA's seal and turtle crews this summer -- until October, when the next crew switch-out occurs.

Biologically, the honu (Hawaiian green sea turtles) are starting to show up in slightly higher numbers -- from 0-1 per day on Tern in mid-winter, to more than a dozen per day now.  (It will be more like 100/day on Tern later, and double that on East Island in peak season.)  We're seeing a few turtle 'rafts' or 'dog piles' -- a bunch of males vying for a female turtle's attention. 

Basking honu on Tern Island

'Old style' metal tag, #G692.  We were lucky to happen to see the first female turtle of the season digging high up on the beach, checking out good spots to nest later in the season.  She was last seen nesting in 1996 and 2002. 

 We also saw two red-footed boobies (ʻĀ wāwae) with signficant oiling in the past month.  One had about 15% of its body covered, and another had about 30%.  We've spotted a handful more with small (quarter-sized) spots.  The oil looked to be old, but we collected feather samples, just in case the oil needs to be analyzed. We'll be keeping a sharp eye out for additional oiling, and are starting to photograph the 'small spot' birds in order to assess how many birds have actually been affected.

Sarah Youngren finds a returned invasive -- sandbur -- under the clothesline.  It was probably accidentally reintroduced by people coming back from East Island, where the weed reappeared four years after 'eradication' -- perhaps due to old seed bank being exposed by record-breaking turtle nesting activity last summer.  Bird, seal and turtle crews will have to be particularly careful not to accidentally move these sticky seeds around more; right now we're hoping to keep re-eradicate the weed in the next several years.

The only bummer news for this week is that because Paula (the manager) has to go back to Honolulu to work in the office, and won't be staying or returning this summer, the benthic monitoring project we were planning to start this winter (but hadn't yet because we had no working boats) will not be carried out.  Of course Paula is very sad to miss out on all the summer actvities (particularly the benthic plate project, as well as helping out the turtle and seal crews), but Meg will be carrying the torch high and proud, and all the other activities will carry on under her guidance.

Dakshina Marlier (USFWS), Abram Fleishman (USFWS), and Morgan Gilmour (UCSC and USFWS) will also be sadly returning to Honolulu, but they have great plans after that!  Dakshina will be moving on to a summer biking position in Alaska, and Abram and Morgan have wildlife jobs in California.  Morgan may be entering graduate school, and if she gets the permits, returning to Tern next winter to continue tagging albatross and boobies, and working on her dissertation tagging great frigatebirds!

More good news is that Sarah and Dan will be staying on at Tern to work on Paula's data quality project, funded by the USFWS Inventory and Monitoring Project, so we can get some of the 30 years of bird monitoring data.  They'll also be able to complete their work on acoustics, plastics, burrowing seabird habitat, working alongside Meg, Megan, Catherine and Ryan.  Yeah!!!

Neighbors.  Snorkeling photos by Abram Fleishman.

Ka Hiapo, our eldest mōlī  (Laysan albatross) chick.  Notice his nice new 'wrist-bracelet' -- a flexible poultry band used to identify chicks.  Ka Hiapo, a.k.a. Goliath, is also the heaviest of our chicks, and part of Dan Rapp's study looking at the effects of plastics on chick growth.  Photo by Sarah Youngren.

Dakshina Marlier, enjoying the sunset.  Photo by Abram Fleishman.

Measurements before applying a geolcator tag to a red-footed booby ('a), as part of Scott Shaffer's (UCSC) study.  The tag will provide us with a map of where the booby goes to forage.  From left to right:  Abram Fleishman, Sarah Youngren, Morgan Gilmour.

Manu o Kū (white tern) feeding its chick.  Does anyone know if this is a mahi?

Hawaiʻi Academy of Arts & Science PCS Experiences Tern Island

On Monday, February 27, 2012 Tern Island came to Mrs. Randi Brennon's grade 7 & 8 science classroom...or at least it felt like that.

Students studied maps of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument and learned where Tern Island is located.  They also learned about some of the other NW Hawaiian Islands, and their Hawaiian names.

Students were challenged in an activity with a poster showing the many kinds of plants and animals that live on Tern and in the surrounding ocean.  There was a lively discussion about taking care of this special island, and possible careers students could follow in their future.

Big Island resident, Erin Kawakami, volunteered as a wildlife monitor on Tern Island from June through December 2011; she shared her experiences while living on the small island.

Erin learned to recognize the 4 different stages that Laysan Albatross chicks go through as they grow up: Downy, then Partly, then Mostly and finally Fully Feathered Chick

Erin and Abram are getting ready to walk through the Laysan Albatross colony on Tern Island.  Each chick will have its own number on a yellow band around a leg.  Every week Erin and Abram will find each chick and write down on the data table if each chick is a DFC, PFC, MFC or FFC.  The 2 volunteers will do this job for many weeks, until...the chicks "fledge," or fly away!

  

Erin is teaching the HAAS PCS students how to write the chick stages in the data table.

Every student had a photo of a Laysan Albatross chick pinned to his/her back.  Erin is pointing to the yellow tape where the chick's number is written.  Only yellow bands with black numbers are put on albatross that are hatched on Tern Island.

Students moved around the classroom to find every chick, identify its stage, and write the information in their data table.

What stage do you think this Laysan Albatross chick is: DFC, PFC, MFC or FFC?

This student is getting some help from an albatross hoaloha (friend).

Looks like the Hawaiʻi Academy of Arts & Science PCS has a healthy colony of Laysan Albatross!

Holy Mōlī -- First Laysan albatross chick of the year!

First mōlī chick of the year!!!!  We'll call him/her Ka Hiapo, First Born.  Ka Hiapo is in Nest #48 of our chick growth study looking at the effects of plastic marine debris ingestion on chick growth, so we'll be able to follow this chick through the season with you.

Ka Hiapo:  The first Laysan albatross chick of the year!  (Photos by Sarah Youngren, 21Jan2012)

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!

photo #1

photo #2

photo #3

photo #4

photo #5

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going

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there

here

you

are!