Pictures and Other Prizes

There was a particular day earlier this summer that deserves remark. Ram needed to hike around the beach at Tolstoi, the eastern tip of the island, to resight cormorant nests from the begining of the summer. Since I'd never been to Tolstoi before, I decided to tag along. The trip turned out as well as could be imagined, short of finding that the steller sea lions had reestablished a rookery out there.

The reason for this day's success was that we were able to take some hard-to-get photographs of fur seals and sea lions. By "some" I mean several hundred. And that's not including the several hundred we deleted. All of our models were remarkably cooperative, and we quickly used up our entire 1 Gig memory card. This caused us to sit down on a giant rock pile and do some field editing. Due to the fact that we were sitting very still and concentratedly looking at the 2.5" screen on the camera, a fox pup walked right up to us. Thankfully we had cleared off a significant amount of space by then. He didn't seem to mind Ram following him around clicking away for several minutes.

By this time we still had not reached the cormorant nest we were looking for, so after a few more seal shots we gave the camera a break and kept trekking. Then we came across a group of six steller sea lions. Of course, some photography was required.

In addition to getting great views of the island's furry occupants, Ram also found an intact glass float. This was cause for much celebration, as such floats are relatively unusual.

So, I believe that I've mentioned that the whole objective of this trip was to look for cormorant nests. More specifically, to look for chicks in cormorant nests. During all of this walking, Ram found a grand total of 1. That's right. 1 chick. (Actually...I stand corrected. It was 2 chicks. Although 1 chick sounds more dramatic). Once we finished walking the designated area (I think I should tell you that by "walk" I really mean hop, skip, jump, trip, stumble, and occassionally walk over the large rocks covering the beach), we decided to scramble up a relatively steep slope (most people would probably refer to it as a cliff) to get back up to the tundra and hike home.