An Avian Metropolis

Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip to Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Provides Lessons for Nicholas School Students About the Good and Bad Impacts of Human Activities p. 2

Students were graded on their blogs, their participation in class discussions and activities, and on an assigned essay, written after returning from Midway, on the concept of wilderness and the delicate balancing act involved in protecting and promoting it.

In addition to Bounds, the class included students Stuart Brown, Saada Al Harthi, Elia Herman, Stacie Koslovsky, Leah Medley, Beth Pike, Sarah Rider and Laura Wallach, all of whom are in the school’s Coastal Environmental Management or Ecosystems Science and Conservation programs.

The Nicholas School’s Dean’s Office provided $20,000 in funding to help defray travel costs associated with the course. Dean Bill Chameides also arranged for award-winning science journalist Eugene Linden, author of eight books and dozens of articles on environmental issues in Time, Smithsonian and other major media, to accompany Read, Johnston and the students on the trip.

“One of my top priorities as dean is to establish an endowment for unique field-trip experiences,” Chameides says. “Making opportunities like this groundbreaking trip to Midway available to more students will bring lasting benefits, not only to the students but our entire school.”

To familiarize themselves with the challenges of managing marine biodiversity—and to provide a point of contrast with what they would soon see on Midway—the group spent the first three days of the trip on the tourist mecca of Oahu. They met with fisheries managers, biologists and working fishermen, toured a local fish auction, and explored the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve and the Ka’ena Point Natural Area Preserve to learn about the impact human development and overfishing has had on the island’s once-pristine ecosystems and marine resources.

“Despite the hordes of people, the views were amazing, with the tropical azure waters contrasting with the lush green vegetation,” Read wrote in the group’s first online blog, written their first evening in Hawaii. “(But) we reflected on how little is left of the original coastal ecosystem here— almost all the birds and plants we saw… have been introduced from elsewhere.”

A friendly competition to be the first to spot a native Hawaiian bird took nearly the entire first day. “It wasn’t until we were hiking at Ka’ena Point, the last remaining wild place on the island, that we finally spotted one,” Read says with chagrin.

By contrast, the group spotted its first native bird on Midway— thousands of them, actually—just moments after their plane touched down on the atoll’s tarmac. Laysan albatrosses covered the ground in every direction, nearly as far as they could see.

“We were overwhelmed by the endless expanse of birds,” student Stacie Koslovsky wrote in her blog that evening. “Everywhere you looked, there was an albatross sitting on a nest, walking around or practicing a mating dance with another bird.”

As the group piled into golf carts and were driven to the nearby former U.S. military barracks where they would be housed for the next 10 days, “the most amazing part was not the substantial number of albatrosses that we saw,” Koslovsky wrote, “but their indifference to our presence. We moved out of the birds’ way. … Here, the birds are the dominant species; they control the environment and the ecosystem.”

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