That's a big rock.... wait.... that's a huge elephant seal!

Throughout the year we get the occasional elephant seal (or smell-a-phant as they are known here) lazing on the beaches. They seem to spend most of their time sleeping, and lying in piles of rotten kelp, which gives them a particularly pungent aroma. Most of the individuals are small juveniles or females, which has made the last couple of weeks particularly exciting when adult males began cluttering the place up. Adult males have the distinctive elephant like nose and are absolutely colossal. It is coming into elephant seal breeding time so the males have begun to claim territory in the hopes that females will come ashore to give birth to the pups that they were conceived 49-50 weeks earlier. So far there aren’t many females, but fingers crossed that we will get a couple of pups. They have already started being born on mainland South Georgia and look absolutely adorable. Bird Island isn’t a major breeding area for them, I can’t imagine why as it seems a pretty cool place to me, but there are usually a few pups. 

My whay a big nostril you have!

Here are a few facts about the Southern elephant seal to make you go “wow!” Males can grow to between 4.5-6.5 metres and can weigh up to 3700kg!! That is around 57 times as much as I weigh, a second good reason they are named after elephants. The females are smaller at between 2.5-4.0 metres, and weighing a measly 359-800kg. The pups are around 1.3m long when born and weighing 36-50kg (so less than me). However they put on up to 3.6kg per day and after less than a month can weigh 110-160kg with a length of 1.6m. The massive weight increase and fairly small increase in length means that they become extremely round and look close to exploding.  They need to go on this massive milk gorge as at only 3 weeks old their mothers leave them to fend for themselves. 

Male elephant seal yawning.

Another cool “ele” fact is that when at sea they have been recorded diving up to 1444m and for almost two hours underwater. As a scuba diver who can only go down a few measly tens of metres, this is pretty astounding. 

An ele and me. He doesn't actually look very big in this picture, but believe me he is.

One of our resident males has taken up “singing” at all hours of the night, and had me confused the first time it woke me up as it sounded like a bit like a tiger roaring but a bit lower in frequency. Luckily for me I was pretty confident that a tiger hadn’t gotten loose on the island so I could sleep on in peace. Hopefully he will find himself a girlfriend soon and we might have ourselves a pup to fawn over.

Is that a big rock? Nope, just an ele using a rock as a pillow.

A male ele with a male fur seal for size comparison.

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)