33 
4 - 13-23 
cocoanut frond, lost his balance & crashed 15' to the ground. To watch him 
waddle off, shaking his feathers into place & eyeing first one side or 
• i 
another of himself and then occasionally looking back exactly as tho to see 
whether we had seen it all was so human as to be screamingly funny. Later 
I 
in the aft. a Laysan Albatross rose too high on his tiptoes to bugle at the 
* t 
end of his dance step, lost his balance and fell over on his back. It was 
several seconds before he could get rolled over & back on his feet and when 
# 
he did the first thing he did was to look around exactly as tho to say "who 
shoved me?" , There is glorious comedy in these birds but it is so rare that 
the chan’ce of getting the interesting things in the movie is nil. The best 
/ 
I can hope for is a bare record of outline and commonest movement, and 
personality and I will not get that of all the species in the time allotted 
I had thought of this light as ideal, but the wind blows night and day to 
V 
ruffle feathers the wrong way etc., and even the light is less desirable 
than the mainland. Ratty soft gray clouds scud before the trade vind and 
are forever banking up into dense masses just when you want to crank some 
interesting action. Then at midday the sun glares through with a tropical 
•* x 
heat haze and a chalk & crayon effect that is worthless for the movies. 
And even if one' wanted to use it the glare Sc heat almost instantly dope all 
activity out of the birds. By 3*3^ or ^-:00 when the birds begin to wake up 
the sun droos behind a cloud bank again. It will be no sinecure - this 
trio - ior r 
esultSj but I wouldn T t have missed the sight and experience 
for worlds. 
Used up some bum (light struck??) film on the sailors packing the outfit 
down to the whale boat. 
-.t r j: 3 3 the a lasthtime and took off e 
'P,c»'n p. Pr-V," 
— —> . <uL il* •. • ^ LL ^ — ,, . 
) 
y the coon Sc myself. They are due back for u; 
