Cruising Home...

I was picked up on 7^th January to set off home.  Due to leaving Signy mid-season this year, the taxi home this time was the Norwegian cruise ship the MS Fram instead of the BAS ship (the RRS Sir David Attenborough that we mostly use).  As a cruise ship has a set agenda for its passengers, instead of heading homewards, once onboard we set off south down to the Antarctic Peninsula.  A fellow scientist Richard who has been at Signy too, also travelled home on the same trip.

The ship visited a number of places along the way, with a first stop at Half Moon Island in the South Shetland Islands

Followed by the steamy volcanic Deception Island

We also stopped to see the beautiful glaciers and icebergs of Wilhelmina Bay along the Antarctic Peninsula

where this leopard seal was snoozing in the sunshine

 We regularly saw whales, including 56 orca one morning!

 

This was my favourite iceberg of the trip

 

As well as these sites, the ship visited a number of penguin colonies and other beautiful places along the way.  Onboard we were considered guest scientists which meant we answered a lot of questions from the passengers.  We also helped the other scientists onboard conducting whale watching stints from the bridge, biosecurity checking visitor's boots before they disembarked at sites and providing information points at penguin landing sites. 

When our Antarctic time was up, we headed north, across the Drake Passage (which was uncharacteristically calm and peaceful) to southern Chile where we travelled up through the fjords to the very pretty Garibaldi glacier, then finally onwards to civilisation at the most southerly cities in the world, Puerto Williams, Ushuaia, and Punta Arenas (depending on your definition of a city).  Here is Puerto Williams.  It was lovely to see greenery and flowers!

We finally arrived back in Punta Arenas on 17th January, where we were flown back to the UK over the following days and I eventually made it back to Swaledale on 21st January.  Its been a fantastic trip throughout and one which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.  It’s now lovely to be back home, although it would be nice if the rain eased enough for me to step out of the door.  Thanks for following my blog this season- I hope you've enjoyed my trip as much as I have!

Moving onwards

They say time flies when you’re having fun.  This is so true and with Christmas and New Year celebrations over, those of us leaving in January began the countdown to heading home, amazed at how fast the time has gone.  There is always plenty of work to be getting on with which keeps us busy, and despite my best intentions to take a couple of days off I still found myself out catching snow petrels on Boxing day and visiting the penguins at Gourlay on New Year’s day!  I wouldn’t have had it any other way however.

From the start of January, part of my work is to monitor the annual build-up of seals at Signy.  An area around the research station is checked for seals regularly and the numbers present recorded.  We get some lovely weddell seals who always manage to stay clean and beautiful.  

The majority of our visitors however are young male fur seals and elephant seals who turn up to find somewhere to haul out for a while to moult their fur, lounge around and have a practice at play-fighting with each other.  The elephant seals are particularly vocal and stinky and resemble large slugs!

At Gourlay the chinstrap chicks started hatching just after Christmas.  Meanwhile, the Adelie and Gentoo chicks which are about a month older, are already getting quite big.  They are now very comical and run around in little gangs chasing their parents to beg for food.

At this time of year I also spend quite a bit of time analysing penguin diet samples to see what they have been eating, and measuring the size of the krill which forms the basis of their diet in a good season.  The diet samples look a little like a seafood dinner!

Some interesting creatures have turned up at Signy this year (both alive and dead).  This fin whale died by the shore and has been providing dinner for the giant petrels ever since.

This leucistic Adelie penguin turned up at North Point (it has a genetic condition that means it is lacking in the dark pigment melanin in the feathers). 

This large crustacean (Glyptonotus antarcticus) was found (and released) alive in the bay

 

This Giant Antarctic Octopus was found at Gourlay (dead).  Note the 30cm ruler for scale- this is a big beastie!

On 7^th January, my season came to an end.  I was picked up by one of the Antarctic cruise ships, the MS Fram.  It dropped off another scientist (Derren) who I am sharing the season with this year.  He will continue to monitor the wildlife to the end of the season.  On the day, cruise passengers from the ship came ashore to visit Signy and learn about how a small research station works.  Afterwards, Richard (another visiting scientist) and I joined the ship and we set sail southwards (yes, I know that's the wrong direction for home!), heading for the Antarctic Peninsula.  Here's the ship arriving at Signy. 

I have never travelled via cruise ship before so the experience is all new to me. We have had an incredible few days as guest scientists onboard the ship and I will write another post about the trip soon.  As I write this, we are still onboard, now almost back into South America, due into Punta Arenas in Chile in 2 days time.  From there I will set off on the long flight home.

Happy New Year

Firstly Happy New Year!  I hope you had a very nice Christmas.  I’ve been pretty busy here over the last few weeks and I’ve not had the chance to write as much on here as I’d hoped!  Hopefully this will bring me up to date a bit.

We have been on a number of trips out and about around the island, including a couple of nights out to stay in the field huts when we needed to count things that are too far away to do as a day trip.

 

The west coast is lovely on a sunny day, with rich green moss and snow and icebergs. 

The island turns to black and white on a cloudy day.

 I still visit the penguin colonies at Gourlay every second day to keep track of where the birds have got to in the breeding season and record laying and hatching dates.    

The chicks are growing very fast and already the Adelie chicks are big enough to hbe left alone, with both parents now at sea hunting for food for them.

As well as my own tasks, i've also been helping a visiting scientist with blood and feather sampling and tracking snow petrels with tiny tail mounted GPS devices.    

Over Christmas we had a very nice time and I enjoyed a couple of days off work which was a bit of a treat as we are usually so busy.  We all enjoyed a very tasty Christmas dinner of turkey and all the trimmings.   

We also seemed to end up baking a vast amount of Christmas goodies which we are still working our way through (mince pies, gingerbread houses, chocolate brownie, penguin shaped biscuits, Christmas cake)- none of us will starve any time soon!  To see the new year in we enjoyed a BBQ, on probably the calmest night we've had here yet.  

 

The time has been passing very quickly and already I am less than 2 weeks from being picked up by the ship and setting off on the journey home.  I am only doing half a season this year, so someone else is coming in to continue the work to the end of the season.

Merry Christmas!

Settling in to the season

The ship left us just over two weeks ago and the team here have settled down into their work routines, making the most of the calm weather.  These footprints are the evidence of my regular commute to work. 

A large chunk of the work I do is part of a long term monitoring programme, where the same data set is collected year after year to reveal the long term trends in the wildlife numbers and breeding success.  My role is to follow the wildlife through their breeding season, using methods such as counting, measuring and weighing, to add this year’s data to the long-term dataset.  The penguin datasets in their current form now span more than 30 years, with a number of the studies dating as far back as the 1950s.

 For me, the first job of the season is to set up my small intensively monitored penguin study plots at Gourlay, a low peninsula, 2 miles away.  I hike to these colonies every second day so I can keep a close eye on the timing of the breeding season.  The timing of the laying/hatching of my study birds at these colonies, tells me when to get out around the rest of the island to do the larger scale counts there, so the long term data sets are comparable over the years.  For example, the egg counts are done when a certain percentage of my study birds have at least one egg, so if the study birds are having an early season the large scale counts can be done earlier too and the data is still comparable.  This keeps the counts standard across all years.

 This is my chinstrap colony...

And my Adelie colony...

To identify my nests at Gourlay, I mark out 100 nests of each species with a numbered brick.  Anything smaller than this does not work as the penguins move things around and pinch each other’s nesting materials and pebbles.  These are the bricks before the colony has been set up.

The large scale colony counts include an egg count, a chick count, and later a fledgling count.  As  the Adelie penguins had already been incubating eggs for quite a while by the time we arrived at Signy, it was time to get to Northpoint to do the Adelie and gentoo egg counts as soon as we could.  This involved a trip across the island to North Point.  On the first trip of the season, this involves checking a safe route up and over the icecap and marking it with flags.  We picked a beautiful day for this, one where the skies were blue and the weather calm.  On a day like this, few places are quite as beautiful.

With the icecap declared safe (no crevasses on the flagged route), we were free to head for Northpoint for the counts.  As it takes several hours to hike over the icecap and along to Northpoint, we hiked over one day, spent the night at Foca field hut and returned back to the research station the following day.  Foca is a lovely little hut, heated by a reflex stove and we enjoyed a cosy night after a long day in the field. 

As well as penguins, Northpoint also has breeding southern giant petrels which are always nice to see. These birds can be grey or white and the white ones look particularly nice in the snow.  

All of the breeding gentoo penguins on the island are at Northpoint- again, another nice treat.

Back on station we have been keeping our skills current, doing some Search and Rescue and first aid training.  I've also made a couple of very large Christmas cakes and some mince pies, and yesterday the Christmas tree went up.