Nice Week

It was a beautiful week.  I spent most of the week catching up on emails and finding out what went on while I was gone.  The volunteers have been busy with the duck surveys, pulling weeds and planting some native plants around the island.  The albatrosses won't be back for a couple more weeks, so we're still trying to do projects that are easier when you don't have over a million birds around. 

Since it was a beautiful day yesterday, we went out to Reef Hotel for a snorkel trip.  The dolphins came and played around the boat for a bit.  So it was another usual day.

John and Eamon are digging a freshwater well on Eastern Island.  We'll use the water for the verbesina removal project that we'll have going on there for the next 4 years.  We dug all afternoon, and although we got to the water pretty quickly, we have to go a lot deeper to make the solar pump effective.

We had a crew out here for many months painting these water tanks by the runway.  They couldn't work on rainy or windy days, so it took a long time.

 I didn't get a lot of great snorkeling pictures yesterday, but it was nice water and there were quite a few fish around.  This is an Oval butterflyfish and a Spectacled Parrotfish.

Here's another Spectacled parrotfish.  The fish make a lot of noise when they chomp on the coral.  You can hear it very well underwater.  These fish are also responsible for making a lot of the sand in the atoll by crushing up the coral that they eat.

This Laysan duck got its head stuck in a plastic ring from a bottlecap a while back.  This happens quite a few times a year.  We caught this one and got the ring off.