February 20, 19&5 
Dear Fearless, 
Boy, you should be glad you 1 re not on this one. The surf has been fierce 
all of the way. You know how we always chug up to Baker and catch that one 
wave and sort of loll our way to shore??? Well this time we charged through 
big surf for 100 yards over lots of mean looking rocks and it wasn f t very 
easy. The wind has been shifting to the North and northeast regularly which 
has made almost all of our landings nasty ones. Baker f however, was the worst 
one of all. We spent one entire afternoon trying to get the raft out through 
surf that boomed in steadily without calm periods and, then in final desperation, 
carried the whole works around to the south shore where the surf wasn't quite 
as bad. Soing off of Baker my raft got clobber beautifully and we suddenly 
found ourselves buried by raft and equipment. If that wasn't a mess. 
On McKean we got eaten alive by ticks. There were millions of them in 
the spot where we always pitch camp and throughout the rest of the island. 
Need I say we got chewed to pieces and didn*t get much sleep. Booty Tern 
returns on McKean were pretty good, however....192. 
I'm happy to report that the vast majority of the last batch of Lesser 
Frigates got off the ground okay. There was some mortality on McKean (49 
birds) but virtually none on Enderbury or Howland. The Lesaers were all 
gone from Enderbury but fairly large numbers of nearly fledged birds were still 
on Howland and McKean. 
The rats on Birnie suffered quite a crash after our last visit. Numbers 
during this visit were down to about 5% of the previous level, ^ou had to 
do a little bit of work just to find a rat. As the result of this there 
was a fairly large (2000 bird) Gray-backed Tern colony nesting on the island. 
Huber ran into 11 Wedge-tails on the ground on Birnie and brought six back to 
camp so that 1 was collected and five banded# An Audubon's shearwater from 
McKean Islaad was also found on Birnie along with several others of the same 
species. On Hi rn ie we also found a MHawaiian Noddy from Christmas. 
On Howland there is a new colony of Sooty Terns (in addition to the previous 
one which is still going along full blast) that is located between the lighthouse 
the usual campsite and Itascatown. It was increasing in size each day. Attached 
to this new colony is a colony of about 60 nesting pair of Gray-backed Terns. 
Huber went wild on Hov;land and did 35^7 birds in one night so that our two day 
total was 12099 (mostly Sooty Terns). He also picked up another of Munro's 
old Sooty Terns (Biol Survey 38-312056) 
Another Hawaiian Noddy from Christmas was found on McKean and a ned—footed 
BooV r from Motu Upua was piclced up on Enderbury where we knocked the heck out 
of the Fed-foots (369 banded and 252 returns)# 
Enderbury,as usual, had the full moon. This time on three straight nights 
we had full moon straight thru. There was a large Sooty Tern colohy on the 
northern end beside the guano heap but they had scans of newly hatched chicks 
that were being demolished wholesale by large numbers of Hermit Crabs. There 
was such a slaughter of chicks that we pulled out of the colony after the first 
night and tried using nets in the moonlight. Didn't do too well at this so only 
ended up with a total of 5144 birds for Enderbury for five nights. The moon 
was absolutely crummy through the whole stay and literally screwed up everything 
we tried to do at night. During the day from 8 am on it was like an nucxxx oven# 
