We all make mistakes....

For those of you who I hadn't already told, one of my jobs here on Midway is to monitor the reproductive success of the two dominant albatross species.

This is a fairly simple process, we walk around and nudge the birds with a stick to make them stand up so we can see if they have an egg, if it has hatched (which we will not see for a few more weeks), or if they are sitting on nothing. And then we go on our way. (It is a little more complex than that, but you get the idea for now.)

This is what we found today:

Look at this Blackfooted's feet. What do you see?

It is a pink bouy. This albatross is incubating a pink buoy.To make matters worse, this was a particularly protective albatross: she was going to protect that buoy with her life if necessary and she wanted us away.