Thursday 25 August 2016, week 15: Buldir Island, 19:10

Time is rapidly flying by, and mere days are left before we Buldirians leave our summer home. I keep looking for ways to delay our return to society, with the only possible winner being a mega storm that means the Tiglax can’t pick us up on time. Unfortunately our current forecast for Friday through Monday calls for variable 10 knot winds and 5 foot seas, roughly as nice as conditions can be for running the skiff to and from the beach. I was reminded that locking the captain in his stateroom and turning the ship for a surprise trip to Attu has a name – mutiny – so regrettably that option is also out.

As the days tick by, we’re checking off tasks for the last time. We’ve made our final visits to the puffin nests we’ve been following on Main Talus and Northwest Ridge. Monday gave us our final round of reaching inside storm petrel burrows and feeling for chicks. With Tuesday’s sunny weather we took down the food weatherport and moved boxes of food to the bunkhouse. Wednesday brought wind and rain but also time for a first attempt at making cinnamon rolls and plenty of inventorying everything in camp. Today found us mostly wrapping up inventories and then taking our last weekly measurements of fork-tailed and Leach’s storm petrel chicks in our chronology plot. Tomorrow we’re planning a day trip to Spike for one last look at our kittiwakes and murres on the ledges, as well as the horned puffins on Bottle Hill.

The end of the field season is no tech’s favorite time of the year. While I haven’t been missing much about the rest of the world, there are a few things I’ve been looking forward to for quite awhile:

•  stable ground
•  football season
• more episodes of “Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People,” a podcast of hour-long phone calls with a host who gets genuinely interested in whatever the caller wants to talk about

Yet on the other hand, among the many aspects of field life that I love, I’ll miss:

• our camp kitchen
• my sleeping bag and plywood headboard (the only headboard I’ve ever had), along with feeling the bunkhouse move with gusts of wind and hearing rain on the roof or sounds of the ocean
• the cutely curious songbird fledgelings that use camp as a playground
• nightly “comms” when we hear what the Tiglax and other island camps have been up to each day

But more recently I’ve realized that the following are good reasons to leave Buldir:

• not wearing Helly Hanson raingear and XtraTufs every single day
• having real eggs on hand
• talking to some friends over the phone
• puppy time
• spending a week on the Tiglax as we return to AK Standard Time

Anyone know of some puppies who need some love in Homer? I’ll be available soon! Until then I’ll enjoy the rest of the abnormally nice weather we’ve had all season on Buldir.