22 10-20-63 After another tidal wave alert kept us up and active late last night we slept in this AM, and then got up to move our equipment into the breezeway to make room for an incoming con- struction crew. This sort of thing is difficult and upsets most of our routines of work: Unless we can get lab space to work in while this crew is here, we are going to have a lot of frozen birds and rats to send back to Washington, and damn lit- tle to do on the many rainy days. We need the prefab Laysan building badly. In the afternoon made a tour of the island in the truck and shot a Yellowlegs-like bird which turned out to be tattler in worn plumage. Tattler's call sounds very much like the Yellowlegs, and unless the ladder-back can be seen, a yellowlegs-like bird in size and voice and general color with yellowlegs is likely not a yellowlegs. The Ladderback is a good character, and we need a specimen to be absolutely positive that this birds is here. Also got a Noddy with a broken wing, and a dead Bonin Petrel on the beach: Skeletonized the petrel and skin- ned one of the several noddys collected in the last two days. 10-21-63 Up this AM to find that we had to again consolidate our equipment to make more room for the construction crew. In essence, we now have no lab space at all and the construction crew plans to be here at least a month - we now find out, and perhaps until Christmas. This is not a pleasing position. In the afternoon I spent nearly two hours lecturing the pilots and crew of the transport on the values of our work and showing them some of the birds here. They were very interested and hopefully will carry back some of ours' and their own enthusiasm to the headquarters of the 14 C.G. District in Honolulu. During the past two weeks I have been active skeletonizing by dermestids most of the skeletons that we have taken, and the results are good. The native dermestids here do every bit as good a job on these skeletons as do the ones which I have used in Ann Arbor, and I expect to ship back finished skeletons in December rather than the partly spoiled bodys which we would otherwise have to send in. We baited the Rat traps again in the afternoon to start Bill on his second period of weekly trapping. We also found a Golden Plover and an immature Brown Booby in the antenna fields with broken wings, apparently again from collisions with guy wires. I froze the booby, and amputated the gangrenous wing of the plover and released him: I expect the plover will survive here as a permanent resident, much in the same status