Happy New Year - 27 December to 2 January

I'm going to start off this post by wishing you all a wonderful New Year and I hope that your heads don't hurt too much...

It has been another long week on the island and there has been no rest for the wicked, even if the rest of the world has stopped. The birds pay no attention to our holidays and so there was much work to be done.
On Monday myself, Ross, Michelle, Mornay and Robyn headed up Tafelkoppie, the peak to the North East of the base. Ross and I had to do Moorhen call counts, which basically are: you hike to a marker and wait there for five minutes counting every time a Moorhen calls. You do this at eleven points and it is supposed to give a rough idea of Moorhen numbers. The others simply came along to get out of the Base and see some of the island. The Sooty Albatrosses breed on the cliffs on the way up and some of them were obliging enough to pose for me. They are really cool looking birds, sooty grey with a yellow "go-faster" stripe on their beaks.

Sooty Albatrosses, Phoebetria fusca

The next day was spent trying to find 70 occupied Soft-plumed Petrel burrows on two transects. We only managed to find fifteen in almost four hours of crawling around in the bracken. We may therefore have to abandon that study as it is going to take lots of our fairly limited time just to locate enough burrows.

The remainder of the week was spent back with the penguins, we have at last been told to stop tagging birds with depth loggers and simply try and recover those that we can, and take stomach samples from ten male and ten female birds to make up the numbers. The January logger deployment has been scrapped completely, which is a wonderful relief. As you may have gathered, Seal Beach is not my favorite place...

Then it was New Years eve and time to party... The less said about that the better. I'll just say it was memorable and I have the hangover to prove it!

Oh well that's it for today, I'm off to start making supper because it is my day as chef today. Steak and mushroom pie...