March 2013

Hello everyone,

So many « crazy men » !

I once tried to use an automatic translator on the French sentence des jeunes fous couverts de duvet, which means more or less « young bobbies (or gannets) covered with eiderdown ». But the French word fou also means « crazy »; and « duvet » also applies to sleeping bags filled with eiderdown; so the suggested translation was: « Crazy young men covered with sleeping bag » which is pretty strange to describe young fluffy birds..

Although Francette and I enjoy tranquility to the point that we spend weeks on end, or months, in places as remote as the islet in the Tuamotu archipelago whence I write to you today, it is not the same for everyone, in particular for the crowd of "boobies" that live on a nearby islet, a ten minutes dinghy ride from our favorite anchoring spot.
We had often sailed by this islet, without noting the cloud of birds whirl winding above its palm trees. But this time he did see quite many of the birds. More precisely, of the species called "red-footed booby", also from time to time we can get a glimpse of a few "masked boobies" (sula dactylatra) with their bright black and white feathers

Why do we use in French the word "fou"? Maybe because the boobies do look crazy when they dive on schools of small fish to catch one to feed their young ones who wait for them in one of the hundreds of nests built in the island's trees. Stripped branches, and specially a heavy odor reveal the presence of these nests, where young boobies still covered with bright white eiderdown (no sleeping bag around!) or where a young booby born a few days earlier carefully watches for the hatching of the second egg that was laid at the same time; when the little brother is born, what will the (slightly) older one do? Send a greeting card: "I am pleased to announce the birth of my small brother Lucien?" Not at all, he acts simply, he kicks the small brother out of the nest, to be sure he himself will be the only one to be fed by his parents.

A few small sharks that look made of gold in the sunset, a ray asleep on the sandy bottom, paradise terns (or fairy terns) that seem to exchange ideas with one another, here is our company in our anchoring spot, plus those darned frigate birds, the thief bird, who watch for fishing boobies: as soon as one of the boobies has caught a small fish, the frigate birds dive onto it, hassling it, grabbing and shaking it until it spits out the fish he had planned to regurgitate to its baby in the nest... not a good world for crazy men !

These were just a few daydreaming images of the world that surrounds us; they tell me it is snowing in Europe, so I send you some of the sun that shines on our lagoon, and I wish you a majestic month of march.

Antoine