Eastern Island—creatively named, as it lies on the East side of the Atoll😉— is a boat ride from Sand Island where we all live. So, the weather and ocean conditions have to cooperate for us to get there to count.

Eastern Island is something over a mile long and over 1/2 mile wide at its widest point. For our count purposes, it’s divided into 10 sectors, and most of them are humungous! This is my 5th count and I still can’t get my head around how much larger Eastern is than it appears on the map.

The first sector we counted this year took eight of us a full day (well, to be precise, seven for the first half of the morning, then eight). Oh, but what a glorious day it was!

Sector E3 is a large (very very large) rectangle, outlined in blue in the image. Most of it is bordered to the north by a thick band of naupaka.

The most efficient way to count it is to send one person off to the naupaka to paint a line along the front edge, and count everything between it and the ocean, while the rest of the team transect the open area back and forth between the sector border (one of the old WW2 runways) and the painted line.

Here’s a image showing my individual transects (am: blue, pm: green) within the team. 3 hours in the morning, and another hour+ after lunch, followed by the long trudge back to the pier. You can see the tighter, more time-consuming track in the morning when we had one less counter (sometimes two less while one was deep in the naupaka) and also some trickier terrain to cover, such as extra pockets of naupaka bushes.

Thankfully, there are very few Bonin petrel burrows in that sector, so no need for burrow shoes, and we transected the sector mostly uninterrupted, apart from negotiating those smaller pockets of vegetation.

It’s not difficult to find an ideal picnic spot for a lunch break. The entire island is bounded by sandy beach, with a spectacular view of ocean and birds.

Back on the pier in the afternoon, waiting to be picked up by the landing craft, we were entertained by a brown booby cooling its feet, and a cute pair of brown noddies.

We returned to Eastern last Friday, this time with our full complement of 12 counters, plus again an additional FWS volunteer for the afternoon after he’d completed his own work. As shown in my track above, having just one extra body widens our line and can add many counted birds to each transect, substantially reducing the time needed for the sector, so we’re always grateful for the extra help.

If anything, Friday’s weather was even better for us, with a light breeze that reduced the temperature by a few degrees.

Every visit to Eastern is special, and worth all the effort we expend working our butts off on the count.😊 Friday also gave us a monk seal hauling out in front of us as we ate lunch on the south shore, a white tern awaiting our return to the pier, and a very playful pod of spinner dolphins escorting us on our way back to Sand Island.