(Tape #2) 
Eugene Kridler to Roger Clapp January 197 ° 
On Scientific Visits to the island, Roger, I have inserted on your sheets 
the visits made in August 1968, March 1969* and May 1969? the persons visiting 
the island, the purpose of the visit, and any remarks. 
Now in September 1968, we spent a good share of our time (John Sincock and 
I) erecting the Refuge sign with some help from the graduate students we had 
with us and a little bit more from the Geological Survey people who drilled the 
holes in the rocks for us so we could insert the base of the sign in the rock 
and cement it in. This did not give us any time to look over the island at all, 
John and I anyway. We did camp on the island and there were an immense number 
of Common or Brown Noddies there on Northwest Cape as well as Sooty Terns but 
the next morning we went right back again to the erection of the sign because 
the Coast Guard was kind of in a hurry to get on the way. The only opportunity 
I got was (John didn’t get hardly any chance at all to look around) to climb 
to the top of Annexation Hill and just kind of look over the general island. 
(Herbst?) 
The one Grad student we had with us wasn’t too helpful, the other one/is getting 
his degree in the Portulaca of Hawaii and as a result, although he made a 
brief botanical survey, he found nothing new other than the five plants which 
are established there and spent most of his time collecting Portulaca and look- 
ing it over. The two Geological Survey people from the Menlo Park office there 
Dalyrimple 
in California, Dick Duell(?) and Ben/(?), helped us with the sign and then they 
collected quite a few core samples of the rock which they took back with them to 
test for the magnetic properties of the rock but as yet we have not received any 
report from them on their findings. 
The March 1969 trip, we thoroughly combed the island, counting just about 
everything that was on it with the possible exception of getting way down into the 
bottoms of the slopes especially on the south side, the very steep south side of 
Necker, the lower slopes. In some ways we probably shouldn’t have even landed on 
the island, the surf was pretty rough, but we made a landing without too much 
problem, but when it came time to get taken off by the Coast Guard in the late 
