41 11-19-63 Up early again today, and in the AM finished the scaveola rip-out vegetation plot. The scaveola clump itself seems to be a single large interconnected series of plants. In the stable parts of this community there are clumps of trunks spaced regularly over the floor of the clump with interconnections between. While the growth does not seem to proceed by runners in colonization of new open spaces, the presence of interconnected groups of trunks in the stable "climax" areas of scaveola certainly suggests that the stable clump replaces the colonizing clump. Perhaps this is accomplished by fusion of adjacent roots from different clumps. In the PM I walked the whole beach affixing metal K - tags to the bamboo stakes, carrying the shotgun, and staking out new albatross study nests. I noted several sanderlings, nine Tattlers, one Yellowlegs (?), many turnstones and plovers, and one curlew in this juncket. Staked out 12 new Black-foot nests, and noted about 30 - 35 Black-foot eggs - No Laysan geese. The incubating Black-feets are so attentive as to allow me to touch them while sitting on the egg, and one bird got a five minute chin-scratching treatment - besides her own monogrammed nest stake. In the evening we caught rats for the ticks that Deseret wanted. In all from 63 rats we recovered 248 ticks. The rats were weighed and frozen for Bill's study. In looking today I found no ticks in the vegetation areas, neither on the beach nor under the driftwood. 11-20-63 Today started poorly: Up at 3 AM to find the thumb swollen and exceedingly painful once again, and did not get the needed sleep. Spent the AM soaking it, catching up on the field notes, and talking with Sundell down at Sand: Apparently Bushmann is there, so I relayed on the information that we had obtained 303 live ticks from over 100 dead rats along with the suggestions that such cannot be continued on a monthly basis and that bird populations should not be shipped from Kure. I hope that these suggestions can be impressed on the powers that be. In the afternoon after soaking the thumb for an hour I set the last of the K stakes and marked out the remaining Black-foot nests. In the evening I wrote letters and saw the flick - the thumb is still very swollen.