March 2012 will be known for its rain. Rain morning, noon and night. Rain in the mountains. Rain at the beach. Rain in town. Rain in the country. Every way you slice it, rain. There were flooding, road closures, rock slides, mud slides and waterfalls I hadn't seen in years. Blessedly, every single one of the Laysan albatross chicks that I monitor survived, even without their parents, who, in March, had started leaving their chicks alone, so they could venture further out to sea and return with great gobs of the regurgitated golden nectar chicks love. At Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge
on Kauai, the red-footed boobies searched the peninsula's hillside for nesting materials. Nene goslings shed their downy fur, feathered out and grew up. On Maui, the rain filled the ponds at Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge
to capacity. That made the native Hawaiian coots and stilts quite happy. A good amount of humpback whales still cruised the Maui triangle, but you could tell a good portion had vacated their breeding grounds for Alaska's fertile feeding grounds. I made a short visit to Oahu, where I discovered a cove of green sea turtles--so many they were hauling out of the ocean and crawling on top of each other to find a bit of land on which to nap. And, that quickly, March slid into April. In like a lion; out like a lamb.