Hillary Young, on Palmyra Island. Well it's been a busy last two weeks of the season, but all continues to go fairly well on the booby project. The tracks keep trickling in, as we have had all our tags out every night since our last report of the first track coming in complete. Which means we are out there checking nests at dawn every morning and tagging birds at dusk every night - not to mention all the other checks for birds that aren't doing what they're "supposed" to be doing and soldering and charging tags. All of which was not too bad when the weather was good, but has become much more exhausting since the rains suddenly reappeared! Here are some tropic birds we nearly stumbled across today.

It's been pouring so hard tonight that the boobies have literally been crashing into the windows here, disoriented by the rain and following the light of the building. We finally turned the lights off and have been working in the dark. The rain also has more practical implication as it limits the time we can tag birds, since we don't want to pull birds off their nests in the rain because it leaves chicks and eggs exposed. But by doing a fair bit of crouching in the boat in the soaking rain and waiting for squalls to pass, we've gotten our tags out. Here's a picture of a booby chick who was just a little too big to get tagged and who is telling us to leave him alone.

However, rain or no rain, tonight will be the last night that we put out tags, as we need to give ourselves a couple days to recover birds that take a few extra days returning to their nests. After that, we will have all winter to look in detail at the tracks we got, and try and figure out what the birds are doing and why they're doing it. We haven't had time to really dig into the data yet, but what we have looks really interesting - with some birds taking really long foraging trips -- traveling all day and covering more than 500 km (300 miles), while others take much shorter excursions. We also have a lot of really close-up data on the birds foraging, and some great activity logs, which tell us about how deep they dive and the temperature of the water.

[From Scott Shaffer at UC-Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab...He's putting together some preliminary track data: This image of this bird was by far the longest track that we've seen. The track is not complete but the bird traveled 537 km before the tag stopped. The max distance from the colony was 137 km. The trip lasted one day. We have seen an overwhelming preponderance for the boobies to head southwest to feed. Only a few birds have traveled due west or northwest. The first image is the entire track; the second one is a closeup that shows more detail about how the bird looks for food.]

But that will come in time. For the moment, we just need to finish up these last tracks and enjoy our last beautiful moments in Palmyra. Here's a picture of the rainbow after a recent rain storm.