Another excellent and gorgeous day on Midway and I’ve been assigned the task of writing today’s blog. I’m saving my top-notch literary skills for the grand finale but here’s a snapshot of what happened on day nine.

We spent the morning setting fire to waffles in the cafeteria followed by arts and crafts — typical grad school activities.   After breakfast we dispersed to collect debris for our morning art project.  We collected mostly small broken-up plastic and made incredible pieces of art with our bare hands.  To collect debris, we had to tiptoe around the fragile burrows of hundreds of Bonin petrels.  Every once in a while, one of us would disappear up to our hips, and have to be dragged out by a buddy. No Bonin petrels were harmed in the making of our art or this blog.

A lot of blood was shed in the name of arts and crafts today. While picking up marine debris, I got in a fight with some fishing gear and suffered a wound resulting in my first visit  — and hopefully last — to the island infirmary for a tetanus shot.

After lunch we headed out to Eastern Island where we were able to see the imperiled and ridiculously rare short-tailed albatross.  This was most definitely the highlight of the trip to Eastern Island. About a week ago, the short-tailed pair hatched the second ever chick outside of Japan.  The global population of short-tailed albatross is only a few thousand breeding pairs (all on a single island off Japan) so it’s very exciting to see these birds in the opening stages of what could be an expansion of their range.