Kridler Commets 
(RBC) 
you recall, took West Palm Valley and the southwest part of the island 
there, down at the lower elevation, and he counted 434 frigate nests and 
182 red-footed. Then the Central Valley, east of East Palm which you took 
Roger, you counted 29 I frigates and l64 red-foots, and in the middle ele¬ 
vation from the' east side to the top of Tanager Peak v/hich John Sincock 
took he counted 322 frigate nests and 135 red-foots. So ' ■» r^vn o o -t- r\ o r* — 
—1 o -1 1 -t r r\-P O Pi iOO -Pri rrcifp c T -i1 A 
were 2,100 nests and about 400 red-foot nests. Most of the frigatebird 
males were displaying, some were displaying on empty nests and some were 
displaying on what appeared to be nest sites, no evidence of ngpting but 
they probably would'have nested there later on in the season, and/a sampling 
of 55 nests I found 29 with eggs, none with chicks, and ,26 empty. This 
would come to about 53 percent with eggs and 47 without eggs. Proably 70- 
80 percent of the males were displaying on partially or completely con¬ 
structed nests; most immatures were soaring, and no chicks found. 
This comes pretty close to what we found in 1965 and I estimated at 
that time, which is just a few days earlier, 2,500 nests without 70 per-, 
cent containing eggs. So the|g pougts are very close and I think they 
are excellent counts^including 0 1 March 1964, however, there we had almost 
twice the number of active nests. Why this should be I don T t know. It 
could very well be that the breeding season was 3-4 weeks advanced so that 
when we landed there in March of 1964 there were a lot more nests. As you 
will recall on our last trip there in March of 1968 there were an awful lot 
of birds displaying and quite a few males flying around and these could 
very well have begun nesting sometime in late March. 
We’ll get to the Sooty Tern here. Wow this count we'! made in March 
of 1965 was pretty good; it is really the only time we made any effort to I 
determine what really could have been there in the way of Sooty Tern popu¬ 
lations . One of the things that makes it so difficult to estimate the 
population of these birds, Roger, as you made have found out, is that there 
are large colonies nesting under the Chenopodium, estensive stands of 
Chenopodium and Sida, or Ilima as the Hawaiian^ call it. I certainly 
agree with you when you state that populations of this species are much 
more under-estimated than over-estimated. 
Ruddy Turnstone all seems to be pretty good, Roger. I crossed out /cp) 
"occasionally and just say "common migrant, present in small numbers.” 
Wow we’ll get over to the White Tern or Fairy Tern, Roger. I don’t C 
like that sentence under populations; Wetmore’s estimate is also larger. It 
"just sounds funny to me./ I don’t know what Wetmore did. Did he actually 
lower himself down the face of the Worth Cliff and work on the wall? In 
other words, how did he estimate what was there? All we could do was throw 
rocks down all along and see how many Woddy and Fairy Terns would fly out 
and get an idea of what could possibly be down there and ..these would be 
minimal figures, and we have no way of knowing the number of birds which 
did not fly out, which were not sufficiently frightened enough to fly out. 
This past August John Sincockand I worked gy.r wa ^ 4he way down to the 
bottom of the Devil’s Slide from the top/near Miller’s Peak and got a dif¬ 
ferent perspective on the shape of that Worth Cliff and were quite impressed 
/about Wetmore’s estimates any more inaccurate that the recent ones 
