Trouble in Paradise - 3 January to 9 January

By now, most of you will have heard what happened here on New Years Eve, if you haven't I'm not going to go into it on a public forum like this but if you want to hear the details, mail me. Anyway as a result of those events, I have decided that getting off this island earlier rather than later is sounding like a good idea and I am seriously considering resigning and coming home in March. Be that as it may, I'm pretty sure you're not reading this to hear me moan, so I'll stop before I scare you off...

With all the admin as a result of the "fun times" mentioned above, very little field work has happened this week, we did some Sooty Albatross counts, basically you sit on a headland and scan the cliff opposite with binoculars and count all the Sooty chicks and adults you can see in a defined area. It is even less exciting than it sounds but it was nice to be able to get out of the base on my own for a while.

A Sooty Albatross chick, aka tea-cosy with a beak

We also did some Great Shearwater burrow-scoping. You take a burrow-scope, which is a long thick cable with a camera and low intensity LEDs on the one end and a battery pack and transmitter on the other. You also have a small box with a black and white LCD screen that displays the images from the camera. You stick the camera (and your arm) down holes in the ground and wiggle it around until (if you are lucky) you see a bird. Then you have to record if it was incubating an egg or a chick or just there. When the ground is wet (which it almost always is) this is quite unpleasant.

Gratuitous Yellow Nosed Atlantic Albatross chick

Anyway, many people have been asking me for photos of the base, the facilities and my room but taking the pictures without a fisheye lens is tricky so here is a link to some photos taken by one of the previous teams.

I went fishing again this Sunday, with more success; catching several Five-Fingers, Acantholtris monodactylus, one of which I kept. They taste great when braaied with an apricot jam marinade, just as you would do for Snoek.

My Five-Finger, about 1.5kg

The happy fisherman...

The fishing also provides a great reason to get out of the base for most of a day, and why not when the fishing is really excellent too.

Thats it for this week, hopefully I'll still be around to post a new one next week.
Ciao