Hillary Young, from Palmyra Island. At long last, success! We have spent 4 months out here in the paradise of Palmyra, being driven partially mad by a variety of troubles thwarting our efforts to get GPS tracks from some red-footed boobies.

Theoretically, these large and relatively sturdy birds should not be so hard to track but it seems as if we have encountered just about every problem imaginable getting these tracks - from trouble getting the animals to return the tags, to batteries that weren't the right size, to faulty microchips in the tags. And all complicated by the limited ability to get things to and from Palmyra, a thousand miles south of Hawaii, which meant that anything we discovered to be wrong took weeks to remedy. But finally, this past weekend we seemed to get the formula in order, and the trials of the tags in the boat and around camp seemed to be working.
So, on Saturday we decided to make another attempt. Late in the afternoon, just as it was cooling down after a long sunny day, Stanford graduate student Doug McCauley and I took the boat out to Paradise Island where a large group of these birds nest. We found an ideal nest -- low in the trees, with a very small chick, and a bird that seemed very calm. With a modified fishing pole, we noosed the bird out of the tree, applied our tag to the top of the feathers, and marked her with blue ink. (The males and females look so much alike, that we want to make sure we recapture the correct bird.)

Within 3 minutes the bird was flying again, and she was back on her nest within 15 minutes, with our tag nestled comfortably on top of her tail. This morning we recovered the tag and were delighted to find it worked! It's still not perfect; we still only get about 25 hours of recording time with the bigger battery we had applied and so we missed the bird's final homecoming.

But even so, the track is beautiful, and very rewarding. Here it is -- Palmyra is the green dot in the lower right corner. The bird traveled 228 miles (379.7 km) in about 12 hours, flying more than 70 miles (115.7 km) from the island. All for one full meal of flying fish! Since the tag samples every second you can see every tiny detail and turn as the bird forages over a school of fish. In this small image, however, most of that detail is lost.
So, in all, it was a wonderful day; it was so exciting to see that first data come in... But the truth is, it really means that now the work has really begun in earnest. We only have about two weeks left here and we need to try and get all our seasons tracks in this short time.

We put out three more tags this afternoon and we'll have to see if our luck holds. Here's a photo of me holding one of the birds we tagged.