Kridler Comments 
(BBC) 
on the island, the rest of the information to you, of course, is second 
hand. I personally have been on the island 9 or 10. times and after a 
while after visiting it of course March, July, late August, and September 
you kind of get a little bit seat-of~the-pants feeling so to speak on 
what is taken place there. Even though in a number of accounts we could 
only give passing attention to some of these species you kind of get an 
idea of what is taking place there. Of course our interest in the last few 
trips had been devoted to getting good population estimates on both'the 
Miller bird and the finch and other information has been picked up along¬ 
side with it. Other trips, of course, like in July, we spent quite a bit 
of time just getting that damn sign on the island and getting that rigged 
up, and of course that's when I got creamed and my wife almost became a 
widow and I was pretty stiff for about four days and pretty badly cut up 
by the rocks when I got banged against them by the waves. 
So as you have said about the White Tern estimates that some of the 
populations are rather subjective. We can only speculate as to what is 
present on the island at night; it is a dangerous place to work at night. 
We hope eventually for each of the species to establish transects on 
other sampling techniques whereby we can approach a little better estimate 
of the population. Then again, some of the bigger birds like frigates and 
the boobies, we can get a pretty good idea of what we have there in the 
number of na^ts while;we’re there. I don’t know how thorough Kramer and 
Swedberg were on those couple counts they were on especially Ray. I have 
8 a feeling these were just general observations. What you seen from off¬ 
shore of course is no indication of what is on the island. One would sur¬ 
mise however that you would expect the relative abundance seen offshore 
to correspond with that which was present on the island, although this 
wouldn’t always hold true. Of course Kramer’s report on Bonin Petrels, 
I’m sure, was either misidentification or a misprint, or a typographical 
error, or he might have written Bonin Petrel on the island and right now 
I am beginning to wonder if in any of my notes on Necker whether we have 
seen any Bonin Petrels there. It seems to me that the first place we ran 
into them was at French Frigate Shoals although it is quite conceivable a 
few might be on these islands at other times of the year. Who knows? 
On the August 1968 trip just general observations were made, Roger. 
I haven’t gotten around to writing the report for my outfit yet. But we 
made just cursory observations of the sea birds there. Most of our effort 
was directed toward trying to find something out about the Miller bird, 
searching for nests, and we were fortunate to find one nest. One of the 
fellows with us. Bob Eddinger, was trying to help us catch Miller birds so 
we could take a small blood smear by making a pin prick on the leg and 
getting a drop of blood out and smear, it on our slides, and we were trying 
to catch some to check plumages and the like and he made a slight (garbled) 
with his net there on Miller Plateau both flew low but the net swung past 
the Sida he exposed a nest with one egg. This is apparently only the third 
nest known to science and we felt it a good opportunity to try and get 
some movie fottage of it and I spent quite a bit of time getting this 
footage. Very good lighting and the like; I understand it is now in the 
Washington office. We were quire thrilled over this, the only thing is 
