Practicalities of life on Bird Island

I’ve been speaking to various people over the last few weeks and everyone seems  keen to know what it is actually like to live on Bird Island. How the food is, what we do in the evenings etc. So this blog entry is just going to be about how the base is run and what we do for a bit of fun. 

I had to put at least one picture of a bird in the post! This is a Wandering albatross that was displaying for it's mate. 

We have a cooking rota which means that I only have to cook once every nine days, which is bliss compared to home! If you are cook for the day, your first job is to do the “earlies”. This means that you have to go to the generator shed and check whichever of the two generators is running for problems, and record pressures on various gauges, temperature, and check how full the tanks are. You also have to check the boiler room, and the water tank room, as well as checking all fridges and freezers to check nothing has broken over night.

In the kitchen your jobs include making jugs of milk (using Nido- dried milk powder), baking two loaves of bread by hand (no bread maker here), cooking dinner for nine, and making sure that the kitchen is kept tidy. Everyone else has to do the washing up and put the dishes through the steriliser. On film nights you have to do a dessert, and if you are on a Saturday you have to do a three course meal. We tend to get a little bit more dressed up on Saturdays (i.e. we don’t just wear thermals). Oh and Sunday is roast day. 

The day after you have been on cook you have to do the “lates”, which is similar to the earlies but you have to make sure all the lights are off and the blinds are closed, so no birds fly into the building, as they are attracted by the light. 

Friday is “gash day”, to you and me that is cleaning day. There is a rota for this too, and jobs can include cleaning the bathrooms, living room/dining room, offices, lab, doing the laundry and checking the food stores, corridors (an easy one) or the boot room. It tends not to take too long depending on what you are allocated, but it’s certainly less than you would have to do at home.

Quite a few people have asked me what my typical day is, each day is pretty varied , but here is a general day. 

Between 8-9 Get up and have breakfast

9-10ish Data entry from the previous day and planning what work needs to be completed for the day

10:30 Hike up to Wanderer Ridge and check all of the birds there for new eggs. If any are found they have to be weighed, measured, the location recorded on GPS, adults identified and marked. Once a week we get the id’s of all of the non-breeders. Each bird has either just a metal ring with a unique number or a plastic one with larger letters that you can read from further away. Check chicks to see if they have fledged. 

12:30 Head back to base for some lunch (usually leftovers or beans on toast)

13:00 Enter data from the morning

14:30 Hike up to the other side of the island to visit the Black brow/Grey head albatross colonies. Check all nests for hatched chicks/failures. 

18:30-19:00 Arrive back at base.

19:00-20:00 Shower and change for dinner, start data entry from the afternoons work.

20:00 Dinner

21:00 Washing up

21:30 Finish data entry or depending on the day watch a film, read a book, play cards, chat on the phone. 

23:30 Bed

That is a general day at the moment, but it all depends what work is on at what time of year. 

Sunday and Wednesday night are film nights (the chef gets to pick) and Thursday night is TV dinner where we watch a TV series (at the moment we are watching “Dream Island” which is a series about Skomer island, off Wales starring our very own Jerry).

Every Monday night we have a base meeting after dinner and discuss any issues, upcoming work, or things that need to be done. 

 As you can see from the schedule there isn’t much time to get bored here, and as we do that 7 days a week (trying to keep the weekends slightly quieter) it’s a busy place. 

All of our food comes in via ship and we will be getting our next delivery of fresh food in about a month. I’ll be glad about that as we have just run out of potatoes and eggs,  and have no other fresh veg apart from onions and carrots. We’ve got around 6 freezers here packed full of food and a whole room of tinned and dried stuff. We tend to eat things that you would have at home like curry, pasta bakes, pie, stew.... normal things- just without the fresh ingredients you’d usually use. As everyone only cooks once every 9 days we tend to eat better than at home, as people go to a lot of effort. 

Other things that keep coming up..... we are on GMT here, but don’t change for the day light hours. As it is summer we have very long days and it doesn’t really get dark until about 11:30pm. The temperature is varying at the moment between about  +5 degrees and – 5 degrees. Although with the wind chill it can feel a lot colder than that sometimes. The weather here changes very rapidly, for example today it started out blowing a gale and raining and then by afternoon the wind had dropped a lot and we had some blue sky. We do have a weather forecast but it isn’t always accurate. I’ve put a screen shot of what we get so you can see that it is very different from the usual weather report in the UK. 

The weather forecast

I’ve also put up a map of the island so that you can picture where things are a bit more. 

A map of the bird colonies on the island. The base is on the south side in the bay with the two semi cicrcles (if you can see what I mean).

I can’t think of anything else at the moment, but if anyone has any questions feel free to ask!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The festive season has come to an end at Bird Island but it was a great one. Although we worked throughout the Christmas period it was still fun and we had plenty of time for celebrating. 

On Christmas eve we had to begin finding and recording all of the Wandering albatross nests across the island. We only had until New Years eve to try and cover the whole island, which is why it was such a busy festive period. On Christmas eve the rest of the team went over to the seal study beach for mince pies and mulled wine, but unfortunately I was on cook so had to stay home  (one person has to be on base at all times for safety reasons- unless we shut down the whole base which is a pain). When they got back we had spicy sausage casserole and a few drinks. 

The official Bird Island Christmas card that got sent to all the other Antarctic bases (I thought ours was the most original- most others were just pictures of penguins!)

On Christmas day I headed up to Wanderer Ridge with Craig to check the Wandering albatross for eggs. By  a massive stroke of luck the weather was absolutely gorgeous and we had a picnic of sweets at the top of the hill and looked down on base and the blue ocean.  On the way back we went to Wanderer valley (which is really close to base) and recorded all of the nests there. It was an early finish on Christmas day and I had time to finish my gingerbread houses (with the help of Craig) and to help with some of the cooking (I made the nut roast for the three veggies). 

We had an excellent Christmas dinner of turkey, ham, nut roast, Yorkshires, roast potatoes and veg. Followed by a lot of different desserts (we all went a bit nuts with the baking over the days before Christmas)- we had Christmas cake (made by Ruth and topped with a 3d male fur seal and puppy), chocolate brownies, white chocolate fudge brownies, Yule log and the gingerbread houses (we didn’t bother getting the Christmas pudding out in the end). 

Christmas day sunset from our window (taken by Craig)

After dinner we had a game of Balderdash- which was absolutely hilarious, and seemed to get more funny as the night and drinks flowed. It was a clear victory for Hannah who almost lapped some of us.....

Then we got the music on and danced to the wee hours. 

Boxing day was a bit of a write off.  We all had a lie in and John kindly made a fry up as we watched a film. I didn’t start work until about 5pm, but I only had to go to Wanderer Ridge which was nice. I don’t like being stuck on base all day. Unfortunately the weather had changed from glorious the day before to cold and windy. 

The next few days were spent between visiting the ridge and colonies E (Grey headed albatross) and J (Black-browed albatross) and going around the island recording all of the Wandering albatross nests. The Grey heads chicks started hatching in earnest, and are extremely cute grey balls of fluff, and then the Black-brow chicks followed suit. They look almost exactly the same and I can only tell the difference by what kind of bird is sitting on top of them! 

Wandering albatross making an attempt to land (they aren't very good at it, this one had about five goes)

Luckily for Jen and I the rest of the team were keen to help with finding the Wanderer nests  so we didn’t have to spend every waking hour out searching over the festive period.  

To date we have found over 650 nests but some of the birds still haven’t laid and we haven’t revisited all areas yet, so it could be up to 800 nests in total across the island. 

On New Year’s eve Jerry and I went out to cover the last couple of sections of the island for Wanderer nests and I checked colony E for Grey head chicks. The weather was the best we have had yet, we actually went out in shorts and t-shirts and walked all the way to the other end of the island without putting more clothes on! It felt really weird not to be wearing salopettes , a coat, and  hat, scarf and gloves. It felt like we were on our summer holidays or something! I think the temperature was probably only around 8 degrees but it felt roasting to us. On the way back Jerry took me to the edge of Big Mac which is the largest Macaroni penguin colony on the island. There are thousands and thousands of penguins there and they are all extremely loud. The chicks have just started hatching and we saw the little brown balls of fluff being protected by their parents. They definitely seem to like fighting- and would peck and smack with the flippers any penguin that got too close to them. It looked painful!

Big Mac Macaroni Penguin colony- this is just part of it!

When we got back it was a quick transformation into our fancy dress costumes ready for the New Year’s eve party. When we all assembled we had a cheetah, the Stig, William Wallace, Dr Strange, a puffin, Britney Spears, a chilli plant, Zorro and Captain J. It was a very varied bunch but everyone looked great. Dr Strange (Ruth) had set up a cocktail bar in the lab so we all headed over there (after eating our body weight in homemade pizza) for a few drinks. The cocktail choices were certainly very different to anything I have ever seen before- definitely Bird Island specialities. The cocktails included; placenta colada, turd toddy and stomach contents sour. I quite liked the placenta colada (I don’t think it actually contained any placenta- mainly frozen red berries). The lab looked great with glassware full of coloured liquids and real eyeballs in jars (mainly from penguins and wandering albatross). At midnight we were out on the jetty, after dodging past the seals and we set off some flares, which looked really pretty (don’t worry there are never any boats in sight of the island so we didn’t have to worry about mistaken distress signals) and had some champagne. We didn’t stay out too long as it was absolutely freezing in our fancy dress costumes. 

Dr Strange (Ruth) in her evil cocktail lab

We headed back to base and watched John and Craig do some fire poi and then a few people had a go at fire breathing (myself not included). After that we decided it was far to cold to stay outside any longer and went back in for some dancing until about 5am! 

Hannah, Ruth, Jen, me and Jon on New Years eve

New Years day didn’t consist of much other than sleep, another fry up, and three films. It was really nice to have my first day off (thanks to Jenny for doing the ridge- because she’s awesome). 

It’s now back to work and we are trying to get all the partners of the albatrosses that were on the nests that we recorded and keep checking daily for new chicks hatching at the colonies. 

The new year hasn’t really gotten to a great start- I woke up yesterday and half of my tooth fell out- just randomly! I managed to save the half but not yet sure what I’m going to do with it. We don’t have anyone here with dental experience, and after checking in the dental box we have the glue to fix it back on, but we don’t have the agitator needed to mix the glue!! Useful!! So at the moment our base commander Tamsin is consulting the medical unit back in the UK to decide what to do. The options are leave it (which might not be the best idea when I won’t be leaving here for another 14 months), make an agitator somehow and glue it back on, or it may be a trip to the Falklands to see a dentist next month.... watch this space! 

Happy New Year to all my friends and family back in the UK, and to whoever else may be reading this. It is certainly going to be a very different year to normal, being entirely spent on this little rock surrounded by the sea, but it should be a great one!