The albatrosses started hatching earlier this month.  The process of pecking at their calcium enclosure and emerging into this world is called “pipping.”  To date, we have 89 nests and 48 chicks at Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge.

It won’t be a Maui weekend, after all.  In an economic counter-move, rental car companies on Maui recently reduced their fleet.  That means, they shipped cars off the island.  I am sure they do this kind of thing on the mainland all the time.  As seasons and travel flavors change, executives move their cars around like grocers use just-in-time inventory practices to stock shelves.  Unfortunately, in the middle of the Pacific, when tourism picks up again, like it always does in February and March, there aren’t enough cars to go around.

So, I went on a whale-watching boat tour the other night and all I got was this picture.  At least, the horizon is somewhat straight.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not that we didn’t see whales.  Whales surrounded us on all sides. “Nine o’clock,” someone yelled from one side of the boat as someone on the other side yelled, “Two-thirty.”  We used a clock to spot whales, using the boat’s prow as 12:00.  At one time, we had groups of whales at nine o’clock, two-thirty and six o’clock.  I didn’t know where to look or which side of the boat to run to.

Here’s a photo I snapped on my way to the whale necropsy last week.  I forgot I took it until I was downloading pictures this weekend.

I left the house before dawn yesterday, something I definitely do not ordinarily do.  As I rounded the island’s one road to the west side–past Kalaheo, past Hanapepe and Waimea, past even Kalaheo–to where the dead whale carcass waited on the beach at PMRF, wrapped in a very large sheet, I peered through sleepy eyes out my front windshield and watched the full moon drop over the mountains.  The sky was so clear that I could easily see the shadows and craters–even the outline of the lady–in the moon.  Out of the corner of my eye, in the reflection of my review mirror, I spied the sun rising behind me.  Sights like this are worth waking up early for. It turned out to be a sensory overloaded day

Sad news:  A dead humpback whale calf washed ashore this afternoon on the westside of Kaua’i.  Here’s the breaking story in The Garden Island newspaper.  I’ll be helping with the necropsy tomorrow.