SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20560 
August kf 1966 
Dear Jane: 
One very important item of business: is the purchase order on the way? If not 
I am going to have problems in outfitting SIC in September. At present I am down to 
V nL C'AA m ^ ~ _, i * L -O O T O J • T m _3 L 1 I 
° about 500 syringes which certainly isn't enough for an SIC trip. I'll need at least 
111 -18 days after the purchase order is received in order to get the supplies - if th 
I air strike is over by then. If not it may take a little longer. If the purchase 
order doesn't get here in time I will be forced to go downtown and pick up enough to 
fehb the trip through (which would mean buying from £00-700 syringes.) Please check 
on this and see if you can prod things along a little bit. 
This morning Dick Merrill, Schreiber and Tuxton went out to Pearl City, picked 
up the four rafts we tried to write off ever so long ago and took them to the 
Property Disposal Section at Pearl Harbor - which is located only about 2 miles from 
the Pearl City Warehouse. They also took three of the 3ix tents we were trying 
to unload (the other three are presently on the Shearwater and will be disposed of 
when the trip returns). It was all a very simple procedure because the people already 
had all of the paper work from the contractor (or the auditor,..whoever they came from). 
The file cards were shipped yesterday — air mail, registered. When you get them 
you'll notice that I have been rooting through the returns as they passed through here 
and have found a number of birds that have returned to their "home" islands after having 
been captured on one or more other islands. You might put someone on this sort of thing 
before duplicating the cards. This would be a relatively simple thing to do by merely 
going to the schedule and checking the facing page on which the number of the return 
sheet has been listed. By doing so you could get a record af all of that particular 
bird's many movements. This would give us a better picture of some of the movements 
that have taken place. I would suggest doing this only for Blue-faced Boobies and 
Red-footed Boobies. It would give us just a little bit more ammunition to use when 
the time came to start writing about some of these birds. 
I am presently hanging onto some more banding schedules and return sheets from 
various island stations since they were submitted with some data missing. I have 
written asking for clarifications which should be back soon* In the meantime. I'll 
hang onto all of the records. (You should have enough to keep you busy for a while. 
anyhow)• 
I have also just finished the additions to the species listings. The new edition 
is a rather bulky one due to the way certain band strings were used. I am trying to 
discourage this type of banding with varying degrees of success. I hope that future 
listings won't be so bulky. I'd like to have these back in time 
the next SIC trip in September, if at all possible.....otherwise that trip's listings 
will be more than 200,000 birds behind. 
I'm also working on the latest edition of the inventory. Everytime I start on 
it there is another interruption (such as Chuck's request for totals). Maybe this 
time I'll be able to get all of the way through the darn thing. 
Regards, 
