Film making Antarctic style

For one August weekend the wintering Antarctic community are all doing the same thing, making films for the annual Antarctic Film Festival. On Friday evening each base is emailed a list of five elements that have to be included in the film, which these year were; the sound of a real sneeze, a bathtub (problematic for us as we don’t have one), a gingerbread man, the phrase “Voulez vous couche avec moi ce soir” and a ping pong ball. We were all excited about making the film and came up with a general Star Wars theme, as we had watched the films earlier in the winter. On Friday night the script was written and we started getting the costumes together, as there are only four of us on the island we each had to play a few different characters.  Saturday was the filming day and we had one of the most fun days we’ve had in the whole winter. A lot of time was spent laughing at the bloopers and just the script in general, which we all thought was pretty funny, but I’ll leave that up to you to judge! As we live on Bird Island we decided we needed to get as many animal extras in as possible including; Gentoo penguins (jabbas), a male fur seal as Chewbacca, some Sheathbills, and a wandering albatross chick as the emperor (who put in a sterling performance). 

The general story of the film is that Han Solo, Leia and Luke have headed to Bird Island to hide out after the destruction of the Death Star in the first film or number four if you want to be pedantic. Unfortunately Darth Vader finds them and heads to the island with a couple of Stormtroopers to capture them.  The goodies then have to fight the baddies and try to escape.

If you are interested in seeing more then you can check the film out on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_cNkvyn288

We completed filming on Saturday and spent Sunday editing the film, and I made a little sequence with R2D2 and C3PO. By the end of Sunday we were done and then had the task of attempting to upload our film on our terrible internet connection. We managed to do it eventually by turning off any other internet seeking equipment. 

It was then time to vote. Slowly we downloaded videos from the other bases and had an evening of watching them. We made our choices best film, best acting, best screenplay, best use of elements, and best cinematography and sent them off. We still haven’t had final confirmation of the results but surprisingly for us Bird Island is doing pretty well being in the top 3 for four categories. So fingers crossed I’ll be able to confirm the results soon. Not bad for the smallest base in Antarctica.

Family days out

During the winter we have taken advantage of the lower work load to have a few “family days out”, when we shut down the base and go out for the day. The first one wasn’t a day out but just a few hours out one evening. Taking advantage of the snowy conditions we hiked up the hill to the peak of Gazella (which overlooks the base). It was my first time up there, as I wanted to save a few places on the island to experience for the first time in the winter.  Jerry, Hannah and myself were joined by Craig who decided he didn’t want to be left alone. We climbed over the crest of Gazella and had an impromptu snowball fight on the edge (well it was Hannah and I against Jerry, and he wasn’t really throwing any snowballs). After spending some time watching for whales off the North Cliffs and admiring the views, we headed down the hill into Wanderer Valley where we saw an all white Giant Petrel (know by us as a Spirit Geep). It was sporting a GLS tracker, but we were too slow to catch it and retrieve the data. Maybe next time! 

After summiting Gazella we paused for a photo in front of La Roche the highest peak on the island (Photo by Craig Brown).

Snow ball fight! I got this one dead on! (Photo by Craig Brown).

On the way back we went to see a few Wandering albatross chicks, and I managed to fall in a bog twice, which is a pretty usual occurrence. It’s pretty dangerous walking around the island with snow covering the ground as you can’t see the numerous holes and bogs that can easily swallow you up to your waist. 

A halo going over the bay

Heading through the snow to the east of the island (Photo by Craig Brown).

Our second trip was a full day affair when we left the base and headed to the eastern end of the island, which is rare to say the least for most of us. The only work done on that side of the island is the monthly Wandering Albatross census so it is a very under visited area.  Again there was a fair amount of snow on the ground which led to Jerry falling thigh deep into a bog, but we soldiered on and eventually got past the worst boggy areas. The eastern side of the island is different in that the terrain is a lot more rocky and involves traversing scree paths high up the hill. We headed down the hill to Natural Arch (another place I hadn’t been to before, mainly due to the large number of Fur seals around earlier in the season). We had lovely views of the South Georgia mountains just across Bird Sound (the small stretch of water that separates us from the mainland). There were a few penguins about and one inquisitive King Penguin very nearly decided to make friends with me, but finally decided I was a bit too weird looking and waddled off. We had a picnic on the beach, but didn’t hang around too long as it was very cold. We then traversed along some icy streams, luckily we all had our trusty spikes on, and followed the coast back towards home. 

Natural arch- it was cold! (Photo by Jerry Gillham).

South Georgia mountains through Natural Arch

After exploring the coast for a while we had a long trudge back up to the scree path high above. We went through deserted penguin colonies, which seem ridiculously far from the water and eventually made it back to the path. It was such a nice day that I decided to go up Gandalf, one of the higher peaks on the island. Everyone else decided to join me, and after a little bit of a struggle made it to the peak, where we could simultaneously see the South Georgia mountains as well as looking down over the North Cliffs of the island. The descent mainly involved sliding down the hill, which was great fun but resulted in ripped trousers, and in some cases skin damage from the rocks. We managed to get up some impressive speed heading down some parts, which was at times a bit scary. We all got home relatively unscathed after a great day out. 

The view from the top of Gandalf looking West- Hannah and Craig are in the picture climbing up but it's hard to see.

Hannah on the summit of Gandalf, it's a long way down!

Hannah and I on Gandalf (Photo by Craig Brown).

Our next foray was to the opposite end of the island, with a hike along the beaches, checking for Leopard seals on the way, and then up and over the hill to Johnson Beach. It is the largest beach on the island and seems to be a favourite haunt of Gentoo penguins. The route to Johnson is around the cliffs and requires some well timed dodges between waves. luckily for us the tide was fairly low so none of us ended up with wet feet. There were lots of Gentoos hanging out on the beach (a few hundred at least ) and we went to the place where you get the best view of it all, Johnson Stack.  Looking at it from the beach it just looks like a tall stack of rock with no possible route up (unless you had ropes and at least some proficiency in climbing. However if you can manage to get around the back (only possible in calm conditions at low tide), then you can scramble up to the top. We paused on top to have a few snacks and to take some pictures whilst admiring the view. 

The four of us on the top of Johnson Stack with Gentoo penguins on the beach in the background.

On the way down we spotted a very strange looking Fur seal, it was a sandy brown colour with spots; very different to all of the other Fur seals on the beach. We went a bit closer and Hannah declared it to be a Brindle fur seal. It was a young male seal and seemed happy chilling out on the rocks, I managed to get a few photos of it. Whilst sitting on a rock on the beach I noticed a number of penguin shaped shadows coming up behind me, and just standing there. A quick glance behind revealed a gang of about eight Gentoo penguins slowly creeping up and looking and Jerry and I inquisitively. They soon got bored of us and wandered over to see what Craig was up to taking photographs of some of their compatriots. 

Strange looking Brindle Fur Seal

Watching penguins can be hilarious for no apparent reason one will suddenly start flapping it’s wings madly and honking at the sky, and then starts running around. It seems to be contagious behaviour as often others around it will start joining in. I  could sit there for hours watching them, and can’t wait until they start nesting again, and we have tiny chicks to amuse us. We walked back up over the top of the island back towards base, and had chance to see lots of my Wandering Albatross chicks that are getting ever bigger and are now as large as their parents. 

Gentoo Penguins on Johnson beach

The final trip was not a complete family day out as Craig had to stay behind to mind the generator which has been playing up after having some new parts fitted. We again headed over to the Eastern side of the island and this time went all the way to the end of the island called Farewell Point. There is one lonely chick living out there, so we sat and gave him a bit of company while we had some snacks and then climbed over to the end of the island to look over the cliffs to see if we could spot any Elephant seals in the water below. 

Jerry and I in front of one of the scree paths (photo by Hannah Wood).

 I always like heading out over to that part of the island as you get lovely views of South Georgia and the water is so blue, it almost looks tropical. On the way back we played in the snow, sliding down the hills in ever more extreme ways. When we were nearly back at base we saw two Giant Petrels mating, a sure sign that spring is on its way, although they are definitely a bit early to be thinking about nesting, I guess they are just keen. Up on Wanderer Ridge lots of adult albatross were back and were busy feeding chicks, or spending time preening each other and ignoring their chicks begging calls for more food. The chicks are absolutely insatiable, even before the parent has managed to sit down after regurgitating one lot of nutrition food, the chick is already begging and tapping the beak of the adult. It’s tiring work being a parent!

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!)