January

In the summer, Signy benefits from long hours of daylight.  This means that to get a nice sunset, you have to wait til quite late in the evening.  As the season wears on however, the sunrises and sunsets start occuring at more civilised times of day!  We were treated to a beautiful evening of pink pastel colours a few weeks ago.



We have also been lucky to have some lovely weather this season.  The view from Signy is second to none when the sun is shining and the sea is full of ice.



January is always a busy time at Signy, both for myself and for the wildlife.  The chinstrap penguin chicks are busy hatching, and the Adelie penguins are busy rearing their chicks, some of which are now very large.  It will only be a few more weeks til the Adelie chicks leave the colonies and head for the sea.  Already the most advanced of these are starting to lose their grey fluffy down to reveal their feathers underneath.  When it is cold they huddle together for warmth and protection.



On a hot day the chicks overheat in their thick fluffy jackets, and can often be seen sprawled out flat in the colonies panting, trying to keep cool.



The Giant petrel chick have just started hatching too.  These birds can be either white or grey with the percentage of white birds increasing the further south you are.  This adult is waiting for its egg to hatch.



The sea ice brings in the Weddell seals.  When fully grown they can look rather odd- as if their head and flippers aren't quite large enough for their body.



But when they are youngsters, they have to be one of the most endearing creatures around, with their smiling cat-like faces and soft spotty grey fur.





 

   

Happy New Year!

Firstly, thanks very much for all my Christmas emails and greetings.  They are always lovely to receive when UK Christmas is so far away!  I hope everyone had a nice Christmas and 2016 has started well.

It's been a busy few weeks here.  Just before Christmas, the RRS James Clark Ross (the ship that we travelled down on) returned to Signy.  It stayed for the day, refuelling the station.  This involved pumping fuel from the ships tanks, into a big rubber flubber in the cargo tender, then bringing it to the jetty and pumping it back out again, into our large fuel shed.  Here you can see the full flubber in the bottom of the tender waiting to be pumped ashore.  We couldn't do this the day we arrived here as the bay was still frozen into the sea ice so we couldn't get the tender to the end of the jetty.



At the end of the day, the JCR left, taking away 4 of the Signy residents (who had finished their science), and exchanging them for 4 new ones.  With only 8 of us on station at any one time, taking away half of them feels a bit odd to begin with but it is suprising how quickly the new faces settle in and become part of the Signy family.  The ever changing group is just a normal part of life here.   

Christmas followed only a couple of days later and we all took some time off to celebrate.  On Christmas morning, some of us ventured out onto the Orwell Glacier to see if we could find any crevasses large enough to abseil into.  We didn't find any quite big enough but it was a nice adventure anyway.



Afterwards we returned to base for a very large Christmas dinner.  With roast turkey, christmas pudding, a tree and decorations, mince pies, christmas cake, and snow falling outside, our Christmas contained everything you would want it to, and we all enjoyed it.

Back at Gourlay, the penguins didn't seem to realise it was Christmas and continued busily rearing their chicks and going about their daily business.  This meant that once Boxing Day was over I had to get back out to work to keep up with them.  The Adelie chicks that were so tiny only a week ago are growing at a very rapid rate.
 


The Adelie breeding season is very short as their nest sites are under snow for most of the year.  This means the chicks seem to grow visibly bigger on a daily basis.  As soon as they are large enough to defend themselves from predatory skuas, the adults will stop guarding the chicks, and instead the chicks form creches, huddling together for warmth and protection.  This allows both parents to spend the day at sea, searching for food to bring back to their chicks in the evenings.



The Skuas are also busy nesting, taking advantage of the abundant food supplies available to them in the form of penguin eggs and small chicks.  While this may seem harsh, the skua chicks have to eat something, and I personally think they have to be one of the nicest chicks on the island.



Skuas are fiercely protective of their young, who unlike penguins, are very mobile as soon as they hatch.  The parents will stay with the chicks as they explore their surroundings, defending them with and open-winged display of aggression.

  

  

Merry Christmas!

Starting work

Once Signy research station is up and running it is time to start some real work.  My first job is to head across to Gourlay, which is a rocky peninsula about a hours walk from the station.  Here, large numbers of Adelie and Chinstrap penguins nest, and this is where I do a large amount of my work.



First job is to transport my numbered bricks from their winter storage in the hut out to my selected colonies.  For this, a plastic sledge is handy (which also sometimes doubles up as my taxi to work).



The numbered bricks are laid out throughout the colony, each marking a nest, and a map is drawn.  100 nests of each species are chosen.  The contents of these nests are then checked every couple of days throughout the season, giving me very detailed dates and information about eggs laid, chicks hatched, nest failure dates etc. 



Although the birds all look the same, if you use a bit of imagination, you can see lines of nests through the colonies, which combined with the helpfully numbered bricks, makes it relatively easy to keep an eye on who is who.  When the birds are incubating, the colonies are neatly ordered, with one bird per nest, and each nest located just out of pecking distance of its neighbour.  The photo below shows this quite well.  



Penguins constantly modify their nest mounds, stealing stones from their less observant neighbours to make their own pile bigger and neater.  This means my nest markers have to be quite substantial, to prevent them from being stolen and moved around the colony by the more ambitious penguins.

My work is part of a long term study to monitor penguin breeding success.  There are around 85,000 pairs of penguins at Signy in total- counting all of these every year would be impossible.  Instead I count the contents of a number of smaller colonies.  By counting the same colonies each year, we can see what the population trends are without having to count the whole island.  For each of these colonies, I count three times during the season- an egg count, a chick count and a fledgling count.  This tells us how the birds are doing through the season (for example, if they only lay one egg instead of two, they may be in poor condition upon arrival, probably as a result of poor feeding over the winter; if lots of the eggs do not hatch, this may show poor weather during incubation, where eggs are left exposed; if not many chicks fledge it may represent poor food supplies during chick rearing). 

The timing of breeding, varies quite a lot from year to year- if there is a lot of sea ice the birds may arrive late and the timing of the whole season shifts backwards.  This is where my nests with marker bricks come into play- by collecting such detailed information about a small group of birds, I can ensure the counts are done at the same stage each year.  For example, the egg count is done 7 days after all of my study birds have at least 1 egg.        

Arrival

After a couple of days moving very slowly through the ice, we finally arrived in a small patch of open water, just off Signy Island, where our research station is situated.  The first day, which felt very wintery, a handful of us went ashore in small boats, to check out the situation and see how things were.  Lying on a tectonic plate boundary, the area is prone to small earthquakes and this, coupled with being left entirely unattended for the Antarctic winter means we had no idea what we might find when we first visit the station. 

This year all was well.  All the buildings were how we had left them.  The snow had drifted deeply around some of the buildings, so first jobs were to start digging to get into the buildings so we could open up the station.







At night we returned to the ship as the station was still cold and dark.  The next day, we all went ashore to start opening up the station properly.  This is hard work and requires a lot of people.  Although there are only 8 of us staying at Signy, there are plenty of willing people, bound for other destinations or part of the Science cruise, on the ship who are keen to dig snow, move boxes and generally help out to get things up and running.

First jobs are to continue digging and to remove shutters from the windows to give us some light.  Meanwhile the techies get started warming up the generators.  The temperature at Signy can get down to -30 degrees centigrade during the winter so we cannot just switch them on.  After a few hours, once they are warm and dry, these can be tentatively fired up.  Once we have power, the heating systems can be started, as can the lighting, and the sea water pumps which allow us to have flushing toilets. 

While the techies are busy, our next job is to get the cargo ashore.  This is all the food (fresh, frozen and dried), science equipment, personal bags, and supplies for the station; enough to last the entire season.  This all has to be brought ashore and man-handled to the right building on station.

The sea around Signy is too shallow for the ship, the James Clark Ross to get very close.  Therefore all cargo that comes ashore is brough in the Cargo Tender- a small landing craft with a crane.   Often the tender can get to the small jetty at the station, but this season the sea ice was still in the bay so everything had to be dropped further along the shore and moved along to the station (you can see the sea ice in the bay, on the left in the picture below). 



Luckily, we have a couple of skidoos, and the large volume of snow this year meant we could use these, making the whole process much easier!  



By the end of the day we had most of the cargo, heating, lighting, and toilets so were able to move off the ship and into our new home.  The Reverse Osmosis Plant, which produces freshwater from seawater, was up and running, but it takes a few days for us to produce enough to be able to fill the tanks and start using it so water is pretty scarce. 

The next day was spent unpacking boxes while the ship waited offshore.  It was too windy for them to launch the boats.  The day after however, the final cargo was brought ashore and everything was finished.  The ship sailed off, heading for South Georgia, leaving 8 of us ashore, and we settled down to the rest of the unpacking, and to get started on the science we have come here to do.