July 15-21

I've lost the schedule for the second week of July but we celebrated Jake's birthday on the 13th and he turned 23 on the 15th. The third week of July had a lot of ant survey work scheduled. We were supposed to do hand searching, and Treatment Monitoring and well as prepare for the All Island Ant Survey. Unfortunately we received enough rain on Monday night to have to cancel the hand searching for Tuesday. On Wednesday we more than doubled the amount of rain we'd received since we got here IN A SINGLE DAY. 88 millimeters at 8:30 am and still raining. Everything was soaking and we over flowed all of our catchment barrels. None of my clothes were completely dry the whole week, even when I hung them in my tent or the ant cave. Most of us ended up putting the rain flys on our tents, even though it made them almost unbearably stuffy, just because the rain would come in sideways and go through the mesh screen on the tops of the tents. I've never had a job that was so weather dependent. The smallest amount of pooling water means we have to cancel any ant surveys because we wouldn't get accurate data if the little ants keep getting washed away. Obviously their behavior changes when there's rainwater water keeping them occupied and trying not to drown.

We did the weekly Tern, Marine Diversity and RTTR Reproduction surveys as well as the bi-weekly Shorebird survey. I felt bad for all my little Red Tail babies, they all looked soggy and sad when I went to survey the on Friday because it had still been raining every day. I also had an increase in the number of fledglings, I believe that a lot of my stage 10s fledged early because they got flooded out. Hopefully they were big enough to be successful but I think they had a better chance if they fledged early then get abandoned or drowned. Some of my crew-mates reported a few abandoned eggs and disappeared chicks. The week before, on Friday the 12th, instead of surveying Shorebirds we surveyed Turtle counts. On Saturday the 20th we celebrated Ryan's birthday even though his actual birthday was exactly a week after Jake's, meaning he turned 24 on the 22nd of July.