We're almost home, just a few more days. But on our way we have Nihoa island to check on one last time.
Fortunately on this visit, we have beautiful weather and we are able to get all of our scientist ashore safely. The weather has been very nice for the past few days, which makes our eastbound transits much nicer. If the normal northeast trade winds are blowing, our eastbound transits are heading directly into the wind which makes the ride on the ship a bit rough. On this day, we arrived to clear skies and calm seas.
Our goal today is to see if the pups that were nursing when we were here on our last visit have weaned. We also want to do a population count and see if the translocated weaners and seals with our satellite tags are around. But first, we need to hike over to the beach with all of our gear.
Arriving at the beach, we find the usual rogues gallery of seals. Since this is the only beach on the island, it can get very crowded. Today is no different and we find a number of seals laying around.
On our patrol of the beach, we find three weaned seal pups without flipper tags. We capture them one at a time to give them their flipper tags and take measurements. After we're done, they go right back to playing and bothering the other seals. Ahh...kids now days.
Then we see them interspersed among the seals on the beach. With our satellite tags still attached to their backs they swim along the shoreline and sleep on the cool wet sand. They seem to be doing what seals do naturally, which hopefully means the satellite tags are collecting a lot of useful data. In a few months the batteries in the tags will run down and the seals will start molting the tags off. But, till then they'll give us a brief insight into the life of the seals at Nihoa.
With our work done, we say goodbye to Nihoa for this year. We also give our thanks for allowing us safe passage and watching over us during our visits.
Photos courtesy of Mark Sullivan.
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