Thursday, 31 Oct 2002

HALEAKALA, Hawaii

I’m a little slow getting started this morning, but it seems like my coworkers and I are on the same page, because they are sluggish as well. We have a short meeting to figure out the schedule for the rest of the week, and then a colleague and I head out to do petrels today. Luckily, we are only going up for a few hours. I don’t think I could handle a whole day of Stairmastering again.

I grab the gear I’ll need this morning and head out. The plan is for me to check in with my coworker via radio, then return to the vehicle after I finish checking one colony. By the time I get to the vehicle, she should have made her way down to the park road for me to pick her up. As I head down the crater rim looking at my petrel map, I figure out the path I will take and try to guess how long it will take me to finish. I guess that I should be done around 12:30 or so — at least, I hope I’ll be done by then, because I didn’t bring my lunch with me and we ate my snacks on the drive up.

This colony is bigger than the one I worked in on Tuesday. It’s directly beneath the visitor center, so when you start hiking back up from the crater floor, you have visitors staring down at you as you huff and puff your way to the top. And right when you get there — or even sometimes while you’re still climbing — they yell down, “Whatcha doing?” If you haven’t tried explaining endangered species conservation while working out on the Stairmaster, it’s not the easiest thing to do.

But luckily, I don’t have to go all the way down to the crater floor like I did on Tuesday; I just have to go about halfway down. And today’s hike rewards me: One of the burrows obviously has a chick in it. It reeks like fish (squid in particular, which is their food of choice) and gray chick down covers the entrance. This is both great and a drag at the same time. It’s great because there is a chick inside. These birds only lay one egg per breeding season; if that egg doesn’t make it, the parent birds do not re-nest. It’s a drag because we clear all the signs after we check the burrow, which means that I have to clear all of the chick down. This can take half an hour or more. Down gets everywhere — and just when you think you have cleared it all, you blow in the entrance and you see more waving back and forth at you.

Happily, all of the down at this burrow is clumped at the entrance on the grass and it doesn’t take too long to clear it up. When I look in the entrance to see if there is anymore, I see a large clump of down — but this one is moving up and down. It’s a chick! The chick is behind some rocks, but just about a foot or two inside the entrance. I see its body move up and down as it breaths, an amazing sight. It took me three years before I saw an Uau in its burrow; it’s very rare to see them there during the day. This definitely makes the hike back up to the top worth it.

On my way back up, I check a few more burrows and then radio my coworker to find out where she is and pick her up. We head back down to the office in the early afternoon for lunch, and then I spend the rest of the day entering Uau data into the computer.