sorry for not posting anything the last few days. i guess i just haven't felt like it. but, i'm baaaack (please try to contain your joy and excitement). not too much has gone on recently. i had the last two days off which i spent hiking around a bit in the rain, reading and relaxing and, of course, taking pictures for all of you to see. the first two pictures are of somewhat random objects found in front of our facility. the first is our giant sign describing who we are and the other is our strange little hawaiian man who is hopefully blessing our birds with fertility! if you continue up the road from our facility you will run into another avian facility that we work closely with called mfbrp (the maui forest bird recovery project). here lives a bunch of people (when they're not camping out in the field) who are lucky enough to go out and do field work with native hawaiian birds. they do behavioral observations, mist netting, nest searching, and also are the ones we go to when we need another bird or two for out captive propagation program. they actually just brought us two new male maui parrotbills less than a month ago. you can see their sign to the left which has a super cool endangered maui native bird (which we unfortunately don't have any of at our facility but there are some at our sister facility on the main island) called a crested honeycreeper or 'akohekohe. to the right is a real picture of the honeycreeper which i didn't take seeing as i haven't had the pleasure of meeting one yet! they are very silly looking birds, but very cute at the same time. i would definitely love to get the chance to study them further in the future!

continuing up the road, i noticed a cool warning sign describing the penalties for harming any of our birds. i was surprised, and very pleased, to see how steep those penalties were for any malice brought upon our birds (in case you didn't know, you can click on any of my pictures to make them larger so you can see and read them more clearly). i guess being endangered has it's perks after all! ;p

now for today. we had yet more goslings hatch today which is exciting. you can see a picture of one of our new nene families to the left. i love the face on dad in the lower right corner. he was definitely giving me the third degree (hissing and honking) for bothering his new family. in order to be sure that all of the new goslings are doing well, we weigh them and band them at about three days old. you can see a picture of my fellow intern, natalie, and a mbcc employee, karen, checking out one of our little guys. after a thorough checking over and quick banding, we weigh them all and then take them back out to their parents. we then have to redo this every week or so when they're little because they grow so fast that their bands will start to cut into their leg if we don't keep an eye on it. that happened to me once with a gambel's quail at liberty (don't worry, i caught it before it got too bad and she healed up perfectly) and i will certainly never let that happen on my watch again! speaking of babies... our final kauai gossling is now pipping and i get to be on hatchling watch tonight. i will definitely take pictures of him coming out of the egg if i am lucky enough to see it! he should come out in the next 6 hours or so because i just checked on him and he has a couple of pretty good cracks going. so exciting!! on a final nene note, here's a pic of a non-breeding pair taking it easy on a sunny day. they have a rough life don't they?!