Anna's Atoll Adventure

                                    Photo Album from Johnston Atoll                                                               Click on an image to enlarge                                                           This is my Home away from Home            Baby Brown Noddy. They run underfoot and their parents fly into your head if you don't duck.                                Stage A1 Frigatebird. Looks like gross Voldemort before he got his new body.         ...

Hi. This is a special edition of "This Johnston Life" because it includes Gross Facts of JA Life and Encounters with Johnston Natives. If you are squeamish about gross stories skip the first section and proceed straight to the cool animal stories! Also, brush up on your Harry Potter if you want to understand some of my references. Gross Facts of JA Life:    Bugs in (are?) Food  - All of our food is packed in air tight buckets or into two chest freezers. We have no real way of storing bread or bread items so we either make all of our baked goods from scratch or from dry mixes. Because of this we have a lot of baking supplies stored in buckets either in the Ant Cave (the bunker we live out of) or in Bunker Row (the row of bunkers our camp supplies are stored in). I don't know how they got here to begin with (most likely all flour has some amount of larvae), but Flour Beetles are found in every bag of flour that wasn't stored properly and there are quite a few of ...

August 1st - 9th We've been preparing for another Tropical Storm since Friday the 6th. This one originated in Hawaiian waters and so was named Akoni. The storm was south of Hawai'i and completely passed those islands and instead traveled straight for us, we are supposed to feel the main force of it by 8am on Tuesday the 10th but most of the effects have been dispersed so we had a small amount of high winds and rain already this morning, the 9th. Our Point of Contact person in the Honolulu office told us we made the local news regarding the storm. The news station said the storm wouldn't severely impact Hawai'i but would pass right over Johnston Atoll and the 5 biologists stationed there. We're pretty excited about the mention. Of course, to our disappointment, Akoni has already been downgraded from Storm to Depression now even below that. This weather event is too small to even have a category. We expect 30mph winds at the most. We still prepared camp as if for a...