Pup weight lifting, crazy colouring and new projects

Once a month in January, February and March we have a puppy weighing morning, when 100 seal pups are weighed. We did the first one this week (the easiest as the pups are small- the biggest was 9.7kg).  It’s a job that everyone helps out with, as it would take the seal assistant a very long time to do it alone. We walked over to Main Bay, for the first time, you couldn’t get there earlier in the season due to the number of seals blocking the way. It was nice to see the base from a different perspective, but weird to think that we haven’t been over there during the two months that we have been on the island. We split into two teams, and were then let loose to grab pups to weigh. Some are easier to catch than others, and you don’t want to pick one that is with its mother, otherwise you’ll have an angry seal chasing you. We managed to do the 100 in about an hour and a half. On the way back we combed the beach for man-made rubbish, which will all be weighed and classified and the data sent off for comparison with the rest of the Antarctic bases. 

Male Antarctic Fur Seal

The seal pup weighing team (photo by Hannah Wood)

It’s a Bird Island tradition that after the puppy weighing the seal assistant cooks everyone a fry up. We were treated to an excellent breakfast courtesy of Hannah and Jon. A quick look at the data shows that the average weight of pups is down on last year considerably. We also heard from the JCR research ship that the number of krill they are surveying is very low, which is probably why the pups are so small. Hopefully the females will be able to find enough food for a good proportion of them to survive. 

This week we were asked to collect feather samples from all of the Black-browed albatross and Grey-headed albatross that we don’t know the sex of. The feathers will be sent back to Cambridge where they will be tested to see if they are male or female. This is being done for some post docs who are working on the albatross data that has been collected over the years. It’s a pretty big job as we have a lot of birds that we don’t know the gender of, but we have made a good start. I’ve got a few good bruises from the Black-brows that didn’t appreciate being sampled from.

We’ve also been busy in colony J (Black-brow study colony) over the last couple of weeks.  We have retrieved some GLS tags from birds that we deployed on a few weeks ago. These are a new type of tag that are being tested out, and so far we’ve got 13 out of 15 back. Not a bad retrieval rate, but hopefully we should get the last two back in the next couple of days. 

A new project this year is the deployment of sound recording devices on Black-brows. We only have two tags, but if they work out then next year there may be a bigger project. Jen and I did the first deployment a few days ago and are now waiting to retrieve the tags and download the data. The aim of the project is to determine if the birds forage with other species of bird, with other Black-brows or on their own. 

Macaroni Penguin family

We are going to try to do 5 or 6 deployments, but we can only do it until the chicks are a certain age. The parents leave the chicks alone when they are no longer at risk of being eaten by Skua’s and only return to feed the chick. If that happened then we would have big trouble in getting the tags back. 

Occasionally you get birds with injuries due to entanglements with man-made objects. Last week when I was checking the Wandering Albatross nests I came across an adult with a fishing hook stuck through the side of his face. I radioed for back up and Jenny came to help me remove the hook. We had to cut the end of the hook off and after a fraught few minutes managed to fully remove the hook. The bird didn’t seem too stressed afterwards and sat back down on his nest. I’ll be keeping an eye on him to see if the wound gets infected. Hopefully he will be feeling much more comfortable without a hook obstructing his throat.  

Wandering Albatross with a fishing hook injury

Since being on the island I hadn’t managed to go and see any of the Blue-eyed Shag colonies, so Jen and I decided to head over to a nearby colony to have a look. They are beautiful and kind of weird looking birds. They have bright blue eyes (hence the name) and yellow knobbly bits on the top of the beak . The chicks are brown bundles of fluff with massively long necks, they look like dinosaurs. It was nice to see them but it does feel a little precarious balancing on the edge of a cliff. 

Blue-eyed Shag nest

Finally we have got a decent amount of ice floating around the island, it has apparently been a good sea ice year further south so the icebergs which would have been trapped in it have only just started coming past. One berg stranded just off the island. Jerry, Jen and I went to investigate further. We managed to scramble down to a rock cove that didn’t have too many seals in it, and got to the sea, where lumps of it had washed up. Jerry filled up two bags of ice and we took it back with us for some gin and tonics that evening. I have to say having thousands of years old ice in your drink definitely makes it taste better. The ice is full of bubbles of gas that were trapped in there at the time it froze, and if you put your ear to it, you can hear it crackling as the gas escapes. Pretty incredible!!! 

Ice berg that provided us with very good G&T ice

The Gentoo chicks are getting big and starting to moult to adult plumage

We had another crazy evening when we decided that the hair dye we all had when the first seal pup was born was just too conservative. Now you definitely couldn’t say that about us. Hannah’s mum sent her equipped with many different colours, and we now have a rainbow of hair colours. You get used to having pink hair surprisingly quickly!

The Bird Island team (photo by Jon Ashburner)

April

The days have been getting progressively shorter on Bird Island since my last post. The sun doesn’t rise now until around 10:00am and has faded away by around 7:00pm. This is in contrast to when I first arrived on the island and it never truly seemed to go dark at all. We have to be increasingly vigilant to ensure that all of the evening checks are done before it goes dark, so we can ensure that no escaping light will attract Prions that could fly into the building and be killed (if not from the impact by hungry Skua’s). 

The weather is starting to chill down- an icy morning on the island

It has been another busy month workwise, and I have been out ringing all of the Grey-headed albatross chicks from colonies E and B, which totals around 200 birds. That is far fewer than the Black-browed albatross chicks, but still a substantial number to get through. Now that the ringing is complete I won’t have any chicks to ring until mid-August when it’s time for the Wandering Albatross chicks to receive their very own rings. 

Ringing a Grey-headed albatross chick

Other than ringing I have finally finished obtaining diet samples from the Grey-headed and Black-browed albatross chicks. I have a total of 30 samples from each species from the three months that their parents have been feeding them. I’ve analysed the main constituents i.e. amount of fish, cephlapod (squid), krill, carrion and other types of food.  Over the winter months I will be spending time in the lab identifying squid beaks, and fish otoliths to get the specific species that they have been eating.

Black-browed albatross chick almost ready to fledge

In the last week the Black-browed albatross chicks have started fledging. In a way I’m sad to see them go, but it’s nice to have seem them through from eggs, to increasingly large fluff balls, to fully grown smart looking birds. I expect in the next couple of weeks for most of them to be gone, which will be very strange. Although having been visiting the colonies on a daily basis, it will be nice to have a break from it, and time to do other things. 

Black-browed chick practicing for take off

The Grey-headed albatross chicks are a little behind in their development, even though they are older than the Black-brows.  Most of them still have quite a lot of fluff, and won’t be fledging for at least another couple of weeks. 

I’m hoping to see at least one chick fledge, as I didn’t manage to see any of the Wandering albatross chicks go this year. It isn’t an easy thing to predict though, and the chicks always seem to know when you are watching and suddenly become very shy. I’ve spent a fair bit of time watching them madly flapping their wings and jumping up and down, unfortunately most of them seem to face the hill rather than away from it, so I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere too soon. 

Gentoo penguin on a cold day

The Wandering albatross chicks have nearly all been left on their own, with both parents at sea gathering food for the insatiably hungry chicks. Some of the chicks clearly have very attentive parents as they have grown massively in the last few weeks. They must now weigh at least a couple of kilograms, in comparison to the approximate 300g they weighed when hatched. As you approach most of them sit up as tall as they can, with their feet sticking out in front of them. They still have a big round body with a thin neck and little head on top. At this age they are mainly all stomach, which they need to be as the parents can bring back 1kg of food at a time!

Wandering albatross chick

The number of penguins of the island has diminished to the point where it is fairly rare to see one. Craig and I managed to get a last trip over to Big Mac, the largest Macaroni penguin colony on the island (second biggest in the world). There were still a decent number of penguins around busy moulting and growing new feathers ready for a winter spent at sea. However it was no-where near the 80,000 birds that were there earlier in the season. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours sitting at the bottom of the colony watching the birds leaping out of the sea when the waves allowed and rushing forward onto dry land before another wave could catch them and pull them back in. Penguins are tough birds! The ferocity of the waves was unbelievable, and you would often see birds being tossed against the rocks repeatedly before managing to stagger out to safety. They seemed none the worse for it, and would spend a couple of minutes preening before joining the queue to head up to the top of the colony. That is one thing I’ve learnt about penguins, they are very English in their queuing habits! After a couple of hours of watching we decided we had better leave, especially after one of the big waves nearly managed to soak us up on the big rock we had been watching from. I certainly didn’t want to have a go at getting out of the sea like the Macaronis did, I would have had no chance. 

Macaroni penguins on their way into the colony

Only a couple of weeks later and I could only spot around 40 penguins on the whole colony, and we won’t be seeing any until the start of next summer in September, when they return to start the breeding season once more. 

Macaroni penguins trying to get back onto dry land

It is not only the penguins that have been disappearing, the seal pups have all gone. Over a period of about a week I noticed that instead of seeing pups everywhere, there were suddenly hardly any left. They are about three or four months old now and have finally felt the urge to head out to sea where they will learn to feed themselves. The females have been returning to find their pups gone, and hang around for a couple of days to see if they come back. Before long the females will depart too leaving a very quiet beach.  

The winter brought us our first storm, which meant a day inside at the wind was very strong and huge waves were driving into the bay and crashing high up on the rocks. The next morning the wind had died down but masses of seaweed had washed up onto our beach. It was over a metre deep in places, and was making life difficult for the penguins that had been on the beach overnight. They struggled to get back to open water clambering over the kelp, and continuously getting it wrapped around their legs and falling. The seals on the other hand seemed to like their new comfy bed, and looked at home curled up on the seaweed. 

On one of our trips to the albatross colonies Jerry and I found lots of washed up marine life on Evermann beach. There were numerous types of starfish, sea squirts, strange looking cephlapods (they look like aliens!). We bagged up a few samples to bring back to base to try and identify. Whilst hunting through the seaweed for interesting specimens I came across a bird ring that had probably washed up in the storm. It was an old American ring, which were the first type used on the island, so I knew it was going to be old. It turned out that the ring had been put onto a Black-browed albatross back in the 1961/1962 season! Who knows how long it has been in the sea, but it’s a good find. 

Variety of Starfish washed up on the beach after the storm

Giant cephlapod washed up on the beach (very alien like)

Hannah and I went out to check how the Light-mantled Sooty albatross chicks were doing, but unfortunately we couldn’t find a single one. They are still more nests to be checked but it isn’t a good sign. The Sooty’s tend to have the worst reproductive performance of all the albatross species’ that we have on Bird Island. It is still disappointing to find empty nests where there were once chicks. On the way back from checking the nests we ventured up to the only accessible cave on the island. It isn’t very big but you could sleep in there if you wished as it was fairly dry at the back. We might have to try it out over the winter. 

Light-mantled Sooty albatross hanging out in the Grey head colony

Star Wars day

Socially we haven’t had a particularly busy month, but we did have another BBQ and hot tub evening, as well as celebrating Star Wars day on the 4^th May. We all dressed up as characters from the film, had a nice meal, played cludeo, and watched the fan made version on Start Wars episode 4.

I apologise for the delay in updating the blog, but the internet here has been really slow over the last couple of weeks. I will attempt to get another update done soon, as lots of exciting things have been happening (Leopard seals!)

Tsunami's and Leopard seals- a dangerous combination

From the beginning of May Hannah (seal scientist) has been on the look out for leopard seals. They only come to Bird Island during the winter season as they prefer cold weather. Every day when I went to colony H Black-browed albatross colony I would scan the beaches to see if I could spot one, but no luck. After spending 6 months on the island it felt strange that a “new” species might turn up, so I was never really expecting to see one. One afternoon I was over at colony E (the other side of the island) weighing some Grey-headed albatross chicks with Jerry when I heard a radio message from Hannah saying that there was a leopard seal on Main Bay, and it was huge! I had a busy day ahead of me checking my various colonies so I was praying that it was a tired leopard seal and would still be napping on the beach a few hours later.

A panoramic view from up the hill, a site I see almost every day

I actually had a really enjoyable day, mainly due to the nice weather, and after visiting the usual colonies headed over to a new part of the island. Every year we have to count the Grey-headed albatross chicks in certain colonies to see how successful a breeding season it has been. One of the colonies I had never been to before so it was a bit of a guessing game trying to figure out which group of chicks I was supposed to be counting. To get there I had to head out onto Johnson point which is not somewhere I usually have to go. I had to walk down the stream (which was useful as I found a couple of ringed Black-brow chicks that hadn’t made it) and up the hill towards the end of the island. It was nice to see the areas I usually spend my time in from a different perspective. 

Wandering albatross family- the chicks are getting big!

From the end of the island I saw lots of different birds including; giant petrels, all four albatross species, Cape Petrels, Skua’s and lots of Blue eyed Shags. It’s nice to see the Wanderers out amongst the waves, gliding effortlessly in between waves, and somehow never managing to get splashed. I had a brief sit down and had a snack whilst taking in the bird life and watching the waves pound the coastline. 

It had been a few hours since I heard about the leopard seal, but luckily for me it was still lying on the beach. From up the hill it looked like a huge smooth grey rock, but when I got a bit closer I could make out some flippers and a head. It was fast asleep lying on its side. I took a few photos but didn’t want to get too close and only had my compact camera with me. Hannah came over to do some more observations so I left her to it, and headed home after a long day. 

Max the leopard seal

The seal already had flipper tags, so we knew it was one that had been at the island previously, and it also had a GLS tracker attached to one of the tags. Hannah managed to get it back, which is very exciting, as it is only the fourth tag retrieved in 10 years. Not much is known about where these seals spend the rest of the year, so every tag retrieved provides valuable data. 

Leopard seals can be identified from the patterns of spots and markings on their skin, so Hannah has to take photographs of all the seals she sees and uploads them to a database to be identified.  The seal seen was identified as Max, a young male leopard seal, who had been seen at the island last year. He didn’t look like a young seal to me as he was huge! Over 3 metres long with a huge powerful head. 

The following day he was spotted out of the water again, so I headed over to take some more photographs, and I got to help Hannah measure him, which you do when he is asleep. He kept waking up because a Sheathbill kept pecking at a big wound on his back (which could have been caused by a male Antarctic Fur seal. It looked very sore, and he was not impressed by the bird, but couldn’t quite manage to grab it before it ran away. 

Max getting annoyed at a Sheathbill that is making a hasty exit

Since then Max has been seen in the water a couple of times feeding. It is obvious when he has made a kill as he is surrounded by a cloud of Giant Petrels and Cape Petrels, looking to grab a piece of his leftovers. It is hard to tell what he is eating as it’s usually below the surface, and leopard seals have a tendency to turn its prey inside out to eat it more easily. It seemed most likely that he had a young fur seal, and possibly a penguin on another occasion. 

Max showing just how big that mouth is- apparently they have a head bigger than a Grizzly bear

A few days after the first sighting of Max, another leopard seal turned up. At first we thought it was Max as it was seen in the same area that he had been feeding in. Looking back at the photos taken Hannah noticed that there was a distinctive S shaped marking on its face. It was definitely not Max. Looking back through the records the seal was identified as Stephanie; a female seal that had first been identified on the island in 2007. I haven’t yet seen her myself but I am hoping to see her soon. 

Leopard seals are not the only exciting species to have been spotted this month. Hannah spotted a Southern Right Whale while doing her daily Leopard seal rounds. It was showing well so I went up to join her and watched it for around half an hour feeding just off the island. Southern Right Whales can be up to 16.4 metres long and can weigh as much as 30 tonnes. I’m not sure how big the one we saw was, as it is hard to estimate but it looked pretty big. Earlier in the season they were spotted regularly around the island, but this was the first individual seen for some time. All records of whales are noted down for our annual report. In other years Killer Whales have been seen off the island, but very rarely.  

South Georgia Pipit

All of the Black-browed Albatross chicks have now fledged, and it is the turn of the Grey-headed Albatrosses. The first chick disappeared on the 14^th May, and I will be checking the study colony every day until the last one goes (which could be as late as the 17^th June). The mortality rate seems to be higher than the Black-browed Albatross chicks, and recently I have been finding dead chicks which when weighed only a few days previously seemed healthy. The only explanation seems to be that Giant Petrels and Skuas are killing chicks, as there is very little food around for them. On the last two occasions that I have been to the colonies I have seen both Giant Petrels and Skuas feeding on dead chicks. Hopefully a good proportion of the remaining chicks will fledge soon, and not become dinner for the other birds. 

Fully grown Giant Petrel chicks- smart birds!

Last week we had an unusual start to the day when the emergency phone started ringing early in the morning. I jumped out of bed to answer it and it was Les back in Cambridge. He was phoning to tell me that there had been a tsunami alert for South Georgia, and it was due to hit in 20 minutes. We had to evacuate the base (which is on the beach) and head to higher ground. I quickly woke everyone up, and we all got kitted up in warm clothes and headed up the hill to wait. It was pitch black outside so we all took torches, and once we had gotten far enough up the hill we sat down in the snow to wait. We had taken an iridium (satellite) phone with us, so we could call Cambridge when we were in a safe place. In the end we stayed up the hill for around an hour before being allowed back down to the base. Luckily the tsunami didn’t materialise, but it was still a scary few minutes when we were getting ready to leave the base. We later learned that there had been an earthquake in the South Sandwich Islands which was fairly shallow, and so could have triggered a tsunami. 

Another task this month was to go and check all of the Light-mantled Sooty Albatross nests that had been found earlier in the season to see if the chicks had survived. It was dire news though, not one chick was found out of an initial 75 nests. It’s hard work to check the nests as they tend to be on cliffs around the coastline which are not easily accessible, and requires you to battle the huge tussac grass. A few months ago I did the same survey with Jenn, to check if the nests had progressed to having chicks. It wasn’t all bad though, as it was a lovely cool frozen day, with nice views of South Georgia. I hadn’t been over to that side of the island for ages, so it made a welcome change. 

View over to South Georgia whilst doing the Sooty census

The number of skuas across the island has been decreasing over the last couple of months. We used to have large numbers of them on the beaches, and you would see them  constantly washing themselves in the streams. They seem to have a serious case of OCD when it comes to bathing! Recently though we only have a few left that hang out around base. One of them is likely to be a permanent resident as he has an injured wing which doesn't seem to be getting any better. He waits outside the door for you and then follows you around hoping to get a bite to eat. Sometimes he's lucky and we are taking the "gash bucket" (slops bucket) out, and he often gets first dibs. We have called him Scratchy, as has very sharp claws. I learnt that when we were examining his injured wing and he managed to slice my finger open.

Scratchy the resident Skua

This month we have been recreating the television programme Come Dine with Me. Each Saturday it is the turn of another Bird Island resident to prepare a three course meal and entertainment for the others. Craig is hoping to make a film out of it once we've finished. The last "episode" is this Saturday, so I'll let you know how it all goes.

Gentoo penguins having a disagreement, the one on the left had walked up and yanked the tail of the other one.