First week on Gough - Wednesday to Sunday - 15 December to 19 December

Church Rock, on the Northeastern coast of Gough

Good news, I have finally made it to Gough after nearly a month in transit. It is a real relief to be here and finally have something to do after spending weeks sitting around with no real purpose. I really don't handle boredom well!

All the way to Gough the sea was quite rough and stormy making me worried that we wouldn't be able to land, but when we came around the Southeastern side of the island it calmed totally. Getting on to the island is normally by helicopter from the SA Agulhas but the Edinburgh is a fishing vessel so no helicopter. We were lowered over the side in a small fiber glass dinghy and motored over to the cliff at Crane Point where we climbed aboard the "Fifty Pence piece", a flat platform about 1.5m in diameter with rope rigging around the sides. We were then hoisted up the cliff by a crane. It was quite fun, if you don't mind heights.

The rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday were spent unpacking and learning from Jerone (the guy I'm replacing) how to calibrate and download GeoLocator Systems (GLS), used to track birds and Dive Depth Loggers (DDL), used to measure penguin dive habits.

Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross with Chick

For the rest of the week we have been counting Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross nest occupancy and contents which involves walking through some of the worst terrain I have ever hiked in. The braken covers everything and is headheight in places and the ground is full of burrowing bird nests which you fall into constantly.

Ross Cowlin, the other RSPB researcher on the island is about my age and (insert chorus of "It's a small world after all) is from Cape Town and used to date Bridget Maasch, a friend of a friend of mine, Kate Larmuth. Weird huh?

Ross, waiting for penguins to return

We have also been tagging Northern Rockhopperpenguins with DDL's, which is a rather tedious process. Fifteen DDL's were attached to adult penguins at the beginning of the month and we have to recover them as the birds come in to feed their chicks. Trying to pick out which bird is which is really difficult even after we have marked their beaks with Tippex and spray painted their chest's after tagging them. We also have to take a bunch of physical measurements, six feathers, 1ml of blood and induce vomiting by filling their stomachs with water and then holding them inverted over a bucket to collect the stomach contents. We are going out there tonight to see if we have better luck in the evening and night than the previous two days daytime shifts. We have recovered only four of the fifteen deployed loggers (which cost $600 each) and we need at least thirty DDL measurements per month for this study...

Northern Rockhopper penguin

The penguin colony is in the middle of Seal Beach, about half a km from the base, the seals are quite aggressive and territorial, they only move because we are bigger than they are. At night with headlamps they wont be able to see how big we are and will only move reluctantly. Tonight is going to be interesting.