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!