I thought that everyone would want to know how the albatrosses here are doing.

All of the Princeville eggs were candled by Dr. Lindsay Young and Dr. Eric VanderWerf of  Pacific Rim Conservation on the evening of December 19th.  “It was a dark and storm night…”  Some of the eggs were definitely good, some decidedly bad, and a few fell in between.

We currently have birds incubating good eggs at 18 nests.

We have 3 sitting on eggs that may or may not be good.

We have 11 sitting on bad eggs.

We have 3 nests that were abandoned.

In my last post I wrote about a nest that was abandoned by a bird who was limping.  I suggested that the injury may have made the bird too uncomfortable to continue incubation, or her survival instinct may have kicked in.  The egg was sitting alone for about 16 days, then her mate returned to the nest and has been incubating the bad egg for the last 17 days.

KP753 sitting on bad egg

Last year, which was a very good year, 20 chicks fledged from Princeville.  The year before, only 10 made it to that point.  This year it appears that the number will be somewhere between those two:   closer to 20, I believe.