Day 203, Year 5: In Search of Roosters and Wrens
Date: Monday, May 17, 2010
Weather: Another Beautiful Day; Winds SE 10-15
Location: Ile Fouquet, Salomon Atoll, Chagos
Compared to last night’s great get together, today was very slow and quiet. Mark installed a new version of MaxSea, the navigation software we use, on our back-up computer. He wanted to see how it works before installing it on the main computer, but he likes and will update the Acer later. We also spent a good chunk of the morning working on routing for the next few months. We are trying to get some idea of when we will realistically reach Brazil next spring. So we checked the logs of friends who traveled from here to there this past year and compared their timing to our projections. Basically, it looks like we will arrive in Brazil in early March. I also worked on naming photos. I’m trying to learn what I can about the plants here so I can name them properly, but we have very little information. But still I enjoy searching through the books we do have and get very excited when I find the actual name of a bush or a tree.
In the afternoon we took a walk down the middle of Takamaka. We have walked around it, but today we were in search of roosters and little wrens with red heads. John of Susan Margaret has seen both, but we saw only chicken scratchings in the dirt and no little wrens of any sort. We did find stands of old and young Banyan trees with their aerial roots falling to the ground from heights of about 80 feet. Sometimes only the huge trunk bases of trees were left and you could easily fit five or six people in the hollow trunks. We found grassy clearings surrounded by bushes and small trees of various types, but mostly we found groves of coconut palms with years of fallen coconuts and palm fronds forming a tangled mess. When we tried to get back out to the beach, we were met by a solid wall of greenery, so we walked along the ‘wall’ until we found a little clearing that led us to the camp on Takamaka. From there it was a short walk back to the dinghy, but because it was high tide, we were wading in water instead of walking on a sand beach. We hadn’t walked far when we heard the unmistakable squawk of a Red-footed Booby. We looked up and there was a mother on a nest with the youngest baby we have seen yet. It was just a ball of white fuzz but eventually it became curious and stuck its little head out to see who was visiting. If this little guy falls out of the next at high tide, he’ll be in the water, so I hope he holds on tight. The nest is just a smattering of twigs that you can see through, but it is enough to provide a platform for mother and baby. What a joy it is to see these beautiful creatures. For me it has been one of the highlights of our time in Chagos. When in the Galapagos I bought a t-shirt that said, “I Love Boobies.” And I do-especially the babies. (Mark says he does too!) There they were blue-footed, here they are red-footed, but both have very cute babies.
Last night we read the grouper feed in the evening, so Mark and Ed tried to catch one of the groupers that we know live on the reef in front of Windbird. No luck. So if we are going to have our picnic lunch of grilled fish on Ile de Passe it looks like we will have to go out there, fish outside, and hope we catch lunch. If not, we’ll all return a bit hungry, so here’s hoping.
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| 100517 Day 203 Salomom, Chagos – Walk on Takamaka |
