Kridler 1 s Comments 
(RBC) 
p. 18 
the little critter was quite wary; the least little bit of movement on my 
■part it would get off the nest and maybe take a half hour or three-quarters 
of an hour to get back on. It came sneaking underneath the vegetation and 
sneak over the lip of the nest and be down on the eggs in just a flash. It 
got off in a flash too, so my footage of course is of the bird incubating 
the eggs and the nests itself with just the eggs after the bird had flown off. 
I had been hoping to get something showing the bird perched on the edge of 
the nest but it the bird was always just too fast for me. Just like what 
has happened to us so often, you get off the island before you really want 
to as sea conditions get a little worse. 
We chugged down on to keeker, probably made the best landing and take¬ 
off we ever made. We had two geological survey people with us for taking 
core samples of the rock and they had some rock drills and drove some holes 
the rock for the new sign. Wound up with John Sincock and I spending all the 
time we had on keeker putting up the sign and I just had only enough time 
to crawl to the top of Annexation Peak and just eyeball the length of the 
island before we came down again. I hope that this sign stays. We got it 
guyed with a number of marine wire cable and if it blows down this time 
damned if I’ll put another one up, somebody else can do it. 
Cot on up to French Frigate Shoals and ran into the same situation 
we had on the trip when you were with us. Got pinned right down on Tern 
Island and couldn’t go anywhere else. This was real aggravating. Ship 
wasn’t able to get its small boat off after the first day and they just 
locked out there and finally even in very rough weather had to start work¬ 
ing buoys and pretty well banged up their boat. Of course, there wasn’t 
too much on Tern Island so it was a rather frustrating two or th r ee days 
that we, or rather four days, that we spent over French Frigate Shoals. 
But then we chugged on up to Laysan where the ship dropped us off and about 
II days later picked us up. 
Got some good population figures from Laysan as to what was there ex¬ 
cepting of course the many, many thousands of shearwaters and Bonin Petrels. 
But other than those I think we got some pretty good counts. John and I 
type-mapped the island. Our botanist friend confined most of his activities 
to, after the first day when he gave us help with the seals, just investigat¬ 
ing the Portulaca . He’s working on his doctorate on PortuLaca so of course 
much of the time was spent on it. The other chap we had with us was of not 
too much use. Wandered around the island taking pictures, gave us a little 
help with the seals, and a little help v/ith the Laysan Teal on our Teal 
count. Wetried to dry-trap Teals but worked the bird to the throat of the 
trap and then they just fly over the top of it. Weather by and large was 
pretty good, very warm, and of course the flies were miserable. We tagged 
a number of seals. 
I was rather surprised by the small number of Blue-faced Boobies and 
also Red-footed Boobies. We checked,around for the Sooty Storm Petrel 
area there in the south end that you had found in March but found.ho evidence 
of them. The lagoon was extremely low and we were able to walk right across 
the bottom about 'two-thirds of the way on the north side. A bit of our time 
