Gene Kridler to Roger Clapp 
Tape #1, 
P-2 
I think under ecology of breeding habitat all observers report or suggest that these 
birds nest over much of the island and in particular on the steeper slopes and cliffs. 
We could add to this that many of the areas are relatively inaccessible and as a result 
have not been checked. Here again, by rolling the rocks down the sides of the cliffs 
especially on that very steep north side of the main island you get Blue-gray Noddies 
and Hawaiian Noddy Terns come sailing out from far down below and undoubtedly they are 
nesting as well as roosting there throughout the year but how are you going to check them? 
You might want to mention the fact that by throwing rocks or stones or rolling rocks 
down the sides of the cliff that we disturb those down below so that or we should say by 
throwing rocks down the cliff that we do disturb the birds in that manner in order to 
get an idea what may be down there and that the Blue-gray Noddies do come out. 
Some more information on the Blue-grays is that the time earmarked to ’69 I 
notice that we did not have this entered on a report but most of the birds which we found 
were incubating eggs. 
MW}**? 
Now we’ll get on to the White or Fairy Tern and here again we’re going to have to 
decide which is the proper usage. I’ve added the 1969 data onto the table and note again 
that in our report under comments we hadn’t indicated anything at all on the breeding 
phenology but we found birds incubating eggs and chicks almost full grown, so I’ll add 
that on to the report and we should put this on this account here. 
Now in your statement here under populations - you say this apparent lack of 
seasonal variation is quite different from other Leeward Islands such as Laysan and 
Lisianski and should be corfabated by more sophisticated survey techniques and visual 
estimations. What sophisticated survey techniques have you made for Laysan and Lisianski? 
It’s my opinion that just about everybody makes a visual estimation on all these islands 
unless we really take the time to go into very time consuming transects or complete 
head counts as far as these birds are concerned. I think we should mention too that 
in most of these cases these are daylight counts and that undoubtedly the night time 
the populations would be much higher, so I’m going to strike that whole sentence out 
and just leave it stated the first sentence which is a fact without a lot of speculation. 
The next sentence data indicate that breeding occurs throughout the year and suggests 
