SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20560 
August 26, 1964 
Mr# A, Binion Amerson 
Division of Birds 
Smithsonian Institution 
Washington 25, D..C* 
Dear Binions 
We received your letter Monday and are making every effort 
to be ready when the final word comes through on the size and 
date of shipment* 
To date, we have 250 Sooty Tern samples and 102 Wedgetail 
samples® We have less than 10 Noddy samples ® the full moon and 
scaredty of birds has made catching both species of Tern difficult* 
We should be able to fill an order for 300 Wedgetails without much 
difficulty «. with Ray here we can catch them in one night* While 
taking blood we banded all the unbanded Wedgetails that we picked up* 
I'm afraid that most of the shipment will have to be banded birds, 
but we will pick and choose when possible* Also, almost all of 
the Wedgetail eggs have hatched out; I hope we don't leave too many 
parentless chicks hy collecting birds now* 
We have been running the mouse census as it was set up here 
when I arrived* I'm not awargl of what your objectives are in running 
this grid; however, may I make a couple of suggestions. If the 
object is a population estimate, I believe we have long since reached 
the point useful data; if you want to obtain home range data, perhaps 
we could move the traps out in a greater radius and make sure we are 
extending beyond their home range. We might need more traps, but I 
think we could get by with 25* We'll keeping running it as a 5x5 grid 
until further word* 
We've set up the guywire census as you suggested, but have not 
been able to get started on running it yet* We plan to run it every 
2 to 3 hrs* We hope to get wind speed and direction data from 
Johnston Island weather bureau to correlate with our findings* 
