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!)