Settled in

With the ship gone, it was time to settle in and start work.  Within a few days of it leaving, the rest of the boxes were all unpacked and the research station was fully up and running.  Everyone settled into their various roles and routines. 

My first job was to head across to Gourlay to my penguin colonies there.  This is where I do the majority of my monitoring work.  It is about an hours walk from the research station.  The Adelie penguins were here long before we were, and are already settled on eggs.  These should start hatching any day now.  For such a noisy bird, the colonies are suprisingly quiet at this stage. 

There are a lot of Adelies at Gourlay...

It is important to try and work out what stage in the breeding season they are at, so I can conduct the rest of the seasons counts at the correct stages through the breeding season to enable them to be consistant over the years and therefore contribute to the longterm datasets.  Their arrival times can vary by several weeks depending on a range of factors such as the amount of sea ice and the condition of the birds themselves.  Once the eggs start to hatch, we will be able to determine when the eggs were laid.    

Away from Gourlay, we had a day trip to Northpoint, which is (as expected) the northern most point of the island. This is where the gentoos nest.  They were also settled on their eggs.

The Blue-eyed shags also nest at Northpoint.  They have spent a lot of time neatly constructing nests and are just starting to lay eggs now.  Being able to fly, they have the advantage of a wider choice of nesting materials and often build with seaweed.  Their nests look much softer and more comfortable than those of the penguins!

There weren't many chinstraps around when we first arrived as they breed later in the season.  The first males were just arriving, to defend their nest sites from rival males and start building a nice pile of pebbles, ready to impress their partners who arrive a few days later.

We have quite a lot of sea ice at present which looks particularly nice on a sunny day.

The sea ice constantly changes.  As the wind direction and tides change, the sea ice moves around so every day is different.  These penguins were in the bay at Foca Cove, which was full of sea ice when we visited. 

Here is Claudia for scale...

We have been quite lucky with the weather so far, enjoying some beautiful sunny days and some lovely snow.

Arrival

After three slightly bumpy days at sea we arrived at the South Orkney Islands, a small group of islands in the southern ocean.  Signy, the island upon which I spend my summer, is one of the smaller islands in this group.  We arrived on a cold day.  The information screen informed us that the sea temperature was -1.32 degrees centigrade.  I always think its strange that water can be below zero degrees and not be frozen solid, but that is the case with salt water.


With the air temperature pretty chilly too, the aft deck was covered in ice where the waves had been washing over it and freezing immediately. 


The rest of the ship looked like some kind of ghost ship with everything white and ice covered.


It was going to be a cold day for working!  The first cargo tender arrived to offload people to start the process of opening up the base for the summer.  Jobs to be done were to dig out the walkways and doorways to the buildings, to remove shutters from the windows and to start the process of getting the services up and running.  On days like this, everyone, regardless of their reason for being onboard, mucks in to get the job done. 


These jobs all take time and have to be done in the right order.  Generators have to be warmed up properly before they can be started and buildings need a chance to warm up before things like communications can be switched on.  The first day went very well, and by the end of the first day we had heating, lighting and flushing toilets on station meaning we were able to spend the first night ashore in our Signy home.

Day two dawned a complete contrast with glorious blue skies and sunshine.

The digging continued...

This pipe is critical to life at Signy- it brings sea water into the generator shed where it is pumped up to the main building for flushing toilets, or diverted to the Reverse Osmosis plant which converts it to drinking water.

By the end of day two we had started making fresh water, all of the cargo was ashore and being unpacked, and the base was starting to feel much more homely.
The ship finally left us with a fully functional base at the end of day three. 



This year there are only 5 of us for the first part of the season, but we are back up to eight people with the next ship call in early December.  There is much to do in the next couple of weeks- unpacking all of the cargo that has come ashore, stocking the foodstore, tidying up, and starting the science that allows us to be here in the first place.

It is great to be home!

A New Season

Back in the UK the clocks were put back an hour.  For me this is time to migrate down to the Antarctic for the summer season, avoiding the long dark UK winters nights.  This year I am returning as usual, to Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands.  This season is significant as it will be my 10th summer season in Antarctica- an entire decade of penguins! 

We flew from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire late on Sunday night, via Cape Verde, and onwards to the Falkland Islands.  We saw little of Cape Verde except the airport building, but it seemed a pleasantly warm place with temperatures reaching 25 degrees at 7am so I expect it was going to be a warm day!  When we arrived in the Falklands we were transported by bus to the ship, the RRS James Clark Ross which was moored just outside Stanley.  Everything happened quite fast this year so there wasn't time to get much sightseeing done in town before we set sail round to Mare Harbour on the other side of the island, where we took on fuel.  Here there was time for a short walk out with my camera. 

It is spring in the Falklands:

Everything is looking quite green (for the Falklands anyway!):

The vegetation is quite sparse with some bizarre plants:

There were some birds around.  These Turkey Vultures were feeding on a dead goose. 

This is a male black-throated or white-bridled finch:

We are now at sea, heading down towards Signy.  Below you can see the ship heading away from the jetty as we left the Falklands:

The crossing has been largely uneventful, but a little bumpy which makes simple tasks somewhat tricky.  It is difficult to sleep when sliding up and down the bunk, and even eating becomes hard when you have to chase your meal around the plate and prevent it from escaping. 

This afternoon it has calmed down a bit and the journey is becoming more comfortable.  It has started to snow and the temperature last time I checked was minus 7.2 degrees centigrade.  With 25knot winds, this is starting to feel rather chilly!  Good numbers of albatrosses have been following the ship for most of the journey:

They hardly ever flap their wings, instead gliding effortlessly and gracefully along behind the ship with seemingly no effort at all.  I think they hope we are a fishing vessel that might throw them something tasty.  They are notoriously difficult to get a decent photograph of when standing on the swaying deck of the ship!  This was the best I could manage on this occasion:

We are due into Signy first thing tomorrow morning so if we are lucky we will awake to icebergs and the snowy peaks of the South Orkney Islands (or possibly dense icy fog!).  It will then take us about 3 days to get us up and running and ready for the coming season.