Birds on Midway — FISHER 
105 
was either smoothed for roads, filled for under- 
ground installations, paved for airplane run- 
ways, or covered by stored material or build- 
ings. Consequently, ground- and burrow-nesting 
species were especially hard-hit; these included 
the albatrosses, the shearwaters and petrels, the 
Noddy Tern, the Blue-faced Booby, the Red- 
tailed Tropic Bird, and the Laysan Rail. Also 
affected were the species nesting on Scaevola 
branches — Hawaiian Tern, Frigate, Laysan 
Finch, Red-footed Booby, and Fairy Tern. 
The nesting sites were usurped and made 
undesirable, permanently in some instances, by 
the presence of these installations. The process 
of construction also proved detrimental. It could 
be expected that most of the shearwaters and 
petrels (and their eggs and young) would be 
destroyed in their burrows by the activities of 
bulldozers filling and smoothing nesting areas. 
Because construction activities went on 24 hours 
a day, diurnal as well as nocturnal birds were 
affected. Eggs and young of Sooty and Noddy 
Terns, Blue-faced Boobies, Tropic Birds, and 
Laysan Rails undoubtedly met the same fate; 
the adults could and probably did move out of 
harm’s way. However, the adults of some species 
would not leave their eggs or young and there- 
fore they were destroyed in one way or another. 
The following account (Woodbury, 1946: 149— 
150) indicates how the albatrosses fared during 
the construction period. 
The men soon tired of watching the birds but 
they couldn’t get rid of them. Everywhere a man 
drove a cat or a bulldozer, the vast populations 
of birds stood in the way, bowing and whacking 
beaks or simply staring off to sea. Small gray 
babies nestled in little hollows made for them 
by their elders and refused to move out. They 
didn’t dare, for they got roundly scolded when- 
ever they left the nest. Washington had sent 
word that the goonies must not be hurt, so for 
a while Gallagher had to detail an extra man 
to walk in front of every vehicle, awkwardly 
requesting the birds to step aside, setting the 
young out of harm’s way one at a time. 
Gallagher protested that too much time was 
being lost; with Ventres’ permission, he gave 
orders to run over the creatures. This didn’t 
work any better, for the dead birds raised such 
a terrible smell that they had to be picked up 
one by one and disposed of. 
Midway never did find a satisfactory solution 
to its bird problem. A year later, when the land- 
plane runways were in, the goonies became such 
a serious menace to the fliers that the Navy 
ordered their extermination. Marines and con- 
struction men armed with two-by-fours and rods 
of reinforcing steel clubbed thousands to death 
— with almost no effect upon the population [?}. 
Although the work of construction never 
ceased entirely, the most detrimental period was 
just before and during the early years of the 
war. Despite the cessation of major construc- 
tion activities the birds continued to be affected 
adversely by the various structures erected and 
by the continuous over-all use of the entire 
island. Fisher and Baldwin (1946: 10-13) 
have discussed this phase of the war’s effect on 
the birds, but additional data and a re-evalua- 
tion of these factorsj seem to make a review 
desirable. Fences, barbed-wire entanglements on 
the beaches, towers, overhead wires, and poles 
proved to be definite hazards to albatrosses and 
other species. Pits, foxholes, and gun emplace- 
ments trapped albatrosses, tropic birds, shear- 
waters, and petrels, resulting in their death by 
starvation. More important than the structures 
that caused physical injury to individual birds 
was the presence of so many structures (build- 
ings, roads, paved runways) on so much of the 
surface of the nesting areas. Nesting sites of all 
ground- and shrub-nesting species were thus 
usurped and the breeding potential of the birds 
reduced. 
All movable vehicles, from bombers to jeeps, 
killed thousands of all avian species inhabiting 
the islands. Airplanes were especially detri- 
mental to the great wheeling flocks of Sooty 
Terns and Red-tailed Tropic Birds. Albatrosses 
of both species were killed in the air, as the 
following account from Woodbury (1946: 
374) shows: "The goonies, likewise, cared 
nothing for the military safety of the station. 
Any pilot who took off or landed on the gleam- 
ing new runways could be sure of hitting half 
