New Volunteers

Most of our albatrosses are back now.  They have started laying their eggs too, so we're back to the usual Midway commotion.  We've got a new set of volunteers in this week.  Anthony, Dani, and Eamon have gone, and Karen, Dan, Ann, and Nik are here for the winter.  They'll be busy with a lot of albatross work, compared to the last group that had a lot of habitat and duck work. 

The male short-tailed albatross is still incubating the egg, so no new news with that. Our weather is cooling down for the winter, still nice compared to most of you, but temps in the 60's are cool for us.  There's not much else to update you with so here are a few pics.

 The albatrosses are filling the yards across the street from my house.

 This is Greg spraying the verbesina on Spit Island.  We also planted some native plants over there (for those who are interested; Pritchardia remota, Chenopodium Oahuense, and Sida fallax), since there are no mice and a lot fewer plant pests.

 A Black-footed albatross flies by.

 Thanks for the help Anthony, Dani, and Eamon.  They decorated a ceiling tile from the All Hands Club to commemorate their stay.

 I didn't take a lot of photos this week, so I'll show you some I took a few weeks ago.  This is in the hangar at the airport, and was painted back when Aloha airlines still flew out here.  We don't use this building anymore, except to keep a few things dry.

 There is still some ropework art on the wall.

Another painting on the in the hallway of the hangar.

'The Darkest Hour' featurette

 Silver Screen Saucers

Contains interviews, new footage from the movie and MINOR PLOT SPOILERS...

'Doctor Who' set for big screen franchise

By Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers

Image credit: BBC

The BBC’s long-running sci-fi TV series Doctor Who is to be transformed into a big screen franchise according to Variety, with Harry Potter director David Yates set to helm the first instalment.

For those unfamiliar with the hugely popular British TV series, Variety describes Doctor Who as being about “the adventures across space and time of a super-intelligent alien in human form, who battles a variety of cosmic bad guys aided by plucky human companions,” noting that “the series ran from 1963 to 1989, and then was successfully rebooted in 2005 by writer Russell T. Davies and subsequently by Steven Moffat (The Adventures of Tintin)." The series has also consistently and - often overtly - tapped into UFOlogical literature and debate.

Yates is developing the Doctor Who movie with Jane Tranter - head of BBC Worldwide Prods. - but fans of ‘The Doctor’ will have to be patient as the movie is currently without a writer and so is unlikely to grace cinema screens any time soon. “We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," Yates told Variety, "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."

Doctor Who fans may also be peeved at the fact that the movie will have little in common with its small screen counterpart. According to Variety, “Yates made clear that his movie adaptation would not follow on from the current TV series, but would take a completely fresh approach to the material.” Yates said that he would be moving away from Doctor Who as imagined by Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat: “We have to put that aside and start from scratch."

It should be noted that two Doctor Who films were produced in the 1960s, both of which starred Peter Cushing: Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Doctor Who: Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966). However, as Variety points out, this new project is “the most high-powered effort to date to launch Doctor Who onto the big screen.”

Short-tailed Albatross Egg

The Short-tailed albatross pair has another egg this year.  We only saw the female here for one day, and now the male is incubating the egg.  So, in just over 2 months, we may have another chick.  I hope the weather is a bit better this winter so this chick doesn't get washed around like the last little bird.

The lead paint workers took the last flight home.  They got shade cloth placed around the cable houses, the old marine barracks, and most of the old buildings near the power plant.  They won't be able to remediate the lead paint from those buildings for a few more months, but at least the chicks this year won't be able to ingest the lead paint chips on the ground around those buildings.

Our volunteers are leaving this week after a lot of great work for us.  We wouldn't be able to do much at all without their help.  We'll have 4 new volunteers for the next 3 months who'll be very busy with a lot of albatross banding.

This is the male short-tailed albatross with it's egg.  We can tell it's the male because the female doesns't have her full adult plumage yet.  When she does, it will be difficult to tell them apart.

The lead paint workers helped us finally finish the 3 guzzlers on Eastern Island, so this is the last of my guzzler building photos.  The ducks will probably start using them as soon as they fill up with rain.

The Black-footed albatrosses are waiting on the old runway on Eastern Island.  They don't want to push through the verbesina until they have to lay their eggs.

This is the view from my backyard.  We have quite a few Laysan albatrosses now.

On our way to snorkel, Eamon hopped into the water to save a Wedge-tailed shearwater that was waterlogged and couldn't fly.  We dropped it off back at the pier so it could dry off and try to fly again later.

The weather was nice enough to go snorkel outside the reef.  The water is deeper, so we see a lot of different fish than inside the atoll, but there isn't much nice coral out there, at least in this area.  This is Dani checking under a ledge for fish.

Here's a couple of Galapagos sharks checking us out.  There were 3 at one point.  They weren't aggressive and just wanted to see what we were up to, so we weren't worried about them.  Those are John Klavitter's feet in the photo.

AMC ‘Thunderstruck’ by new UFO drama

Silver Screen Saucers

Deadline reports that AMC – the TV network behind the critically acclaimed horror series The Walking Dead – is to branch out into the sci-fi genre with Thunderstruck, “an hour-long UFO project” from executive producers Paul Boardman, Scott Derrickson and David Eick.

Boardman and Derrickson will write the drama, which, according to Deadline, is “about powerful and enigmatic entities that begin appearing all over the world.” Of special note is the story’s geographical setting, which no doubt will ring a bell with students of UFO history... Deadline continues:

“After one shows up in the town of Great Falls, Montana, the local citizens must grapple with the dramatic effects and growing mystery of repeated visitations.”

Thunderstruck will be directed by Derrickson, whose 2005 horror The Exorcism of Emily Rose was considerably better than his dead-on-arrival remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Production will likely commence sometime in 2012.

'Darkest' aliens to arrive this Christmas

By Robbie Graham Silver Screen Saucers

Summit Entertainment has just released the North American Poster for The Darkest Hour - a Moscow-set, post-apocalyptic 3-D alien invasion thriller due for release in the U.S. on Christmas Day...

Image credit: Yahoo! Movies

View the trailer here...

See also:

'The Darkest Hour': story details, artwork revealed

Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus': news update

Silver Screen Saucers

The hotly anticipated Alien prequel Prometheus edges ever closer to the big screen as its shoot is now complete and its director, Ridley Scott (left), has just dropped a few more hints about its Ancient Astronaut-themed narrative.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) quotes Scott as saying: “The central metaphor of Prometheus is about a ‘higher being’ who challenges the gods, and the gods don’t want to give him fire."

WSJ continues...

“’Fire is our first form of technology,’ Scott says, and so by taking fire, the higher being is punished ‘in perpetuity in a horrible fashion.’ Much like the story of the mythological god, Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and, for his actions, was bound to a rock with an eagle eternally devouring his liver.”

WSJ notes that “Scott is especially excited about the story of Prometheus — you can hear the enthusiasm in his voice when he discusses the film. The screenplay was written by Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts. “I think the reason why I haven’t attempted science fiction in a number of years is because I haven’t really come across a script that I really liked,” Scott says. “This developed and came out extremely well.”

WSJ has also confirmed with 20th Century Fox that Sigourney Weaver – star of the first four Alien films – does not make a cameo in Prometheus, but notes that, according to Scott, “the last eight minutes of the Prometheus story evolve into “a pretty good DNA of the Alien one.”

Regarding the use of 3-D and CGI in his film, Scott told WSJ that he has “completely taken off into this cyberworld,” referring to the Prometheus shoot as “the best time I’ve had in a number of years making a movie.”

It is also reassuring that, although the veteran director has “embraced ‘all the tricks, [and] the toys’ of computer-generated imagery and 3-D,” his movie’s fantastical effects will remain refreshingly old-school: “I’m a great believer in filming the real thing if you can and so I did a lot of building the real thing.”

Prometheus stars Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron. It is scheduled for a June 2012 release.

Related articles:

'Alien' prequel to explore 'Ancient Astronaut' theory

Ridley Scott talks 'Prometheus'; first official image released