Puppy Parade

In the last week or so the fur seal puppies, who have been our constant companions since November, have suddenly disappeared, leaving the beaches around the island empty and silent. Everyone is sorry to see the puppies go, since puppy watching is one of our favourite pastimes. The first seal puppy appeared on Freshwater Beach (the beach in front of the base) on the 14th November and was quickly followed by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands more. Indeed, at peak pupping time around Christmas it was almost impossible to look out of a window without witnessing the miracle of birth. Labour for fur seals is very quick, with the pup usually popping out in a matter of minutes. Although a bit soggy and confused looking, new-born pups are immediately alert and mobile; no doubt the ability to get out of the way of rampaging harem males is hard-wired into their genes.

A new-born pup gets acquainted with its mother.

I *heart* my Mom.

Within a few hours of birth the puppies have dried off, had a nutritious milk meal and started to explore their surroundings. To begin with this is limited to the area immediately around Mom but they soon become more confident and go further afield, clambering over rocks and tussac, and playing with the neighbour’s kids. At this stage the puppies are almost indescribably cute. Little black bundles of fuzz with enormous blue eyes, butter-wouldn’t-melt faces, tiny droopy ears and outsize flippers which they constantly trip over. If cuteness were measured on a scale I’ve just invented based on the cuteness of kittens, then each puppy would measure roughly 1000 kittenpower. Most new-born puppies are jet black, but about 1 in 600 are born platinum blonde. These blonde seals stay blonde for their entire life, and we occasionally see fully grown blonde males and females on the island. And if you thought the black puppies were cute, the blondies are enough to reduce anyone, even hard-nosed technical services personnel, into a slushy, cooing, simpering mess.

You lookin' at me?

Puppy playfight.

Enormous, pleading eyes are the secret of puppy-appeal.

Scratching is a favourite pastime for puppies and adults alike.

These blonde puppies are cute, but so difficult to keep clean.

Moms and pups stay together on the beach for about 10 days, after which time the females go back out to sea to feed and periodically return to suckle their offspring. This presents the females with a challenge – if the beach has, say, 1000 identical black puppies cavorting on it, how do you know which one is yours? The female seals overcome this problem using a vocalization which I like to call the ‘bellow-shriek’. When a female emerges from the sea she immediately starts to holler at the top of her lungs; a sound which lies somewhere between ‘fox being strangled’ and ‘massacre at a yodelling competition’. She then wanders around the beach and tussac, hollering continuously, until she hears her puppy reply. The puppies respond with a kind of bleating/mewling noise, and presumably both Mom and pup produce a unique noise with which they can identify one another. Once re-united, the female and puppy continue to bellow at each other for a while, just to make sure, before settling down for dinner and a nap. Throughout the summer months the beach and surrounding hillsides echo with the howling cries of female seals and their pups. The sound does not seem to abate at night, indeed it seems to intensify. On more than one occasion I have been wrenched from the blissful depths of sleep by the banshee-like wailing of a female seal directly outside my window, an experience I don’t think I will ever get used to.

The bellow-shriek in action.

As the puppies get older they also get bolder, and develop an insatiable curiosity. The base and outbuildings are basically like a big adventure playground to them; anything that can be climbed on is climbed on, anything that can be hidden under is hidden under and anything that can be crawled through is crawled through. If you leave a door open for more than a few seconds then the building will be invaded by puppies. At various times over the summer I have had to herd puppies out of the generator shed, the food store, the porch and the kitchen. The walkways around the buildings are a favourite sleeping platform for them, being flat, rock-free and relatively dry, and we constantly have to move puppies from around the doors in order to get through them. Puppies start to swim from an early age, although they stick to the sheltered bays and large rockpools to begin with. These areas are always choc-full of puppies, hundreds at a time, leaping, splashing and charging about with exuberant energy, and resemble nothing more than a lido full of children on a hot summer’s day.

A puppy investigates.

Spending some quality time with the puppies.

I call this position 'upward facing seal'.

 

Andrex puppies.

 

 Stacey clears a path to the door.

 

Playtime at the pool.

Naps can happen at any moment.

In January, February and March a sample of fur seal puppies are weighed as part of the ongoing monitoring program on the island. Each month weights are collected for 50 beach puppies and 50 tussac puppies on Main Bay – tussac puppies weighing on average slightly more than beach puppies. Catching 100 puppies is hard work so everyone on base is roped into this activity, with two people weighing and recording data, and the rest chasing down puppies and bringing them back to the weighstation. In January puppy weighing is reasonably easy, since the pups are still fairly small and docile at that stage. By March they are much bigger, faster, angrier and bitier, making the whole process a lot more taxing. Carrying a 15kg puppy which is writhing and struggling and trying to sink its teeth into your leg gives you a full cardio-vascular workout, and by the end of the weighing session everyone is exhausted and mud-spattered.

Pre-puppy weighing;  Ags, Paul, me, Joan, Jon.

Post-puppy weighing; Jon, Paul and Joan.

 Post-puppy weighing; me, Stacey Ags. They say the people who did the most work end up the dirtiest, but I don't believe that.

By mid-March all of the puppies have moulted out of their black baby fur into a sleek silver-grey coat, and their numbers have started to diminish as they head out to sea to begin their adult life. By mid-April there are almost no puppies to be seen anywhere. We are not completely seal-less, however. There are always a few females lounging on the beach and in the tussac, and the occasional widge (juvenile seals aged 1-2 years) and young male also turns up. But the puppy parade is over for this season, and we will have to wait another seven months before it starts all over again.

Submarine puppy.

Fighting is still playful, but preparation for the real thing in later life.

Looking sleek and mean in a new silvery coat.

Playing with a feather whilst sitting in a pool. What could be more fun?

Now we are four

On Sunday 27th March the RRS Ernest Shackleton parked itself in front of Bird Island to undertake 'last call', the last ship visit we will have before the onset of winter. As well as taking away all the people who are not wintering, the Shack was also dropping off some supplies and removing all our rubbish and unnecessary equipment. The ship's crew had predicted that the whole operation would take around two hours, and so eleven hours later when we were still loading cargo, we reflected on how unpredictable boating operations can be.

Last call draws a line between the summer and winter seasons on Bird Island. Of course there have already been signs that winter is approaching - the nights are getting longer, the weather is getting colder, the animals are starting to leave - but after last call we are reduced to a winter crew of just four people, and there will be no more ship visits until September; it really feels like there has been a big change. We are also waving goodbye to some good friends. I will particularly miss Ags, our stalwart Base Commander and my roommate since November, and Stacey, the outgoing penguin assistant who has been training me all summer. Stacey has been here for two and a half years, and takes with her a vast amount of knowledge about Bird Island. Those are some mighty big penguin assistant shoes I now have to fill.

It's hard to believe that summer is over already, and the carnival of reproduction on the island is coming to an end. There are still lots of animals around but more and more leave every day. The gentoo and macaroni penguin chicks are all gone, the giant petrels are fledging and the fur seal pups are disappearing. We will not be completely alone in the winter though; for the last month or so wandering albatross chicks have been popping out of eggs all over the island, and they will be with us through the long, dark, snowy months, sitting resolutely on their nests. It's a crazy breeding strategy if you ask me, but I guess they know what they are doing.

But for now we are trying to get used to an eerily quiet base, and having to cook every four days, and not having Stacey or Ags around whenever we have a dumb question about anything. There is an overwhelming sense that all the grown-ups have gone out and left us kids home alone. Can we cope, or will it all go a bit 'Lord of the Flies'? Tune in in six months time to find out.

Team Bird Island as it was : (back row from left) Stacey, Andy, Jen, Paul, Chris, Ags, (front row) Mick and myself.

Final goodbye. Stacey (purple hat) has not left the island for two and a half years and understandably looks a little shell-shocked.

The Ernest Shackleton steams away.

Team Bird Island as it is now: Mick (Winter Base Commander / seal assistant), Paul (technical services), Jen (albatross assistant),  me (penguin assistant).

Professional Penguin Wrangler

‘Just what does a Professional Penguin Wrangler do all day?’ is a question that literally tens of people have asked me. My duties, penguin-wise at least, mostly fall into three categories: counting penguins, weighing penguins and sticking stuff onto penguins.

1. Counting penguins.

There are two species of penguin that breed on Bird Island, the gentoo penguin and the macaroni penguin. In order to guage the health of the penguin populations, and ultimately the health of Antarctic ecosystems in general, it is important to know how many penguins are breeding in a given year, and this means counting them at various stages of the breeding cycle. Counts are done at several penguin colonies during build-up (when the penguins arrive and claim a nest site), after all eggs have been laid and finally just before the chicks fledge. Build-up had already passed by the time I arrived on Bird Island, so my first penguin counting experience was a nest count of macaroni penguins at Big Mac colony. Big Mac, as the name suggests, is very big, housing around 40,000 pairs of penguins in any given year. Counting all of them would be impossible, so instead we estimate the total number by counting all the penguins in two ten-metre wide transects that run from the top to the bottom of the colony. The transects are marked out with yellow stones and divided into 5x5m squares, with each square being counted in turn to give the total.

On my first penguin counting day, the 30th November, the weather was grim – windy, raining and cold – so by the time Stacey and I reached Big Mac we were already rather soggy and dejected. Big Mac is steep and made up of rocks and loose rocky shale, and the rain had made it slicker than an ice rink. It was also completely covered in angry penguins. We edged our way gingerly down to the bottom, trying not to slip, with the penguins honking their disapproval at us on all sides. At this stage the macs had just laid their eggs and both birds from each pair were hanging around at the nest, creating an extremely high penguin density. Since every vaguely flat crevice was occupied by a penguin sitting on an egg, there were few stable footholds, so I slithered and stumbled my way up to the first set of yellow rocks with furious penguins pecking at my ankles the whole way. At the top of the first quadrat we turned around and counted the nests in it. ‘Twenty-eight,’ Stacey yelled at me over the cacophony of penguins. ‘Thirty-six,’ I bellowed back. We counted again. The cold began to penetrate my clothes.The rain had not abated and even the penguins looked wet and miserable, hunched over their eggs. On the third count we both got the same number, and were able to move on to the next quadrat. More slipping and sliding and, at times, crawling along on my hands and knees through the hordes of angry penguins. And so it went on until, 24 quadrats later, we reached the top; cold, wet, bedraggled and caked in penguin guano. We immediately moved on to the second transect, and by the time we had finished it I had lost all feeling in my hands and had developed a deep loathing for penguins, rain, the person who devised these transects and Antarctica in general. Fortunately there was a field hut nearby, and after a fortifying cup of tea I felt much more cheerful and decided that I didn’t hate penguins after all, which is lucky really, given what my job is.

There are 80,000 penguins at Big Mac colony. Fortunately we don't have to count all of them.

Counting gentoo chicks is a team effort.

2. Weighing penguins.

Another indicator of the health of penguin communities is the average weight of the penguins. In years when there is a lot of food available penguins will be fatter, and fat, healthy penguins are more likely to be able to raise their chicks to fledging. The weight of the chicks just before they fledge is also a good indicator of whether they will survive the winter, and thus provides information on annual survival rates. The traditional way to weigh a penguin is to grab it, shove it into a bag and weigh it using a pesola spring balance. However one of my jobs here on Bird Island is to look after the penguin weighbridge, an ingenious device created by the boffins at BAS, which allows automated penguin weighing.

The penguin weighbridge is situated beside Little Mac, a small macaroni penguin colony that contains around 400 nests. The location of Little Mac means that all the penguins, when walking to and from the sea, pass through a narrow bottleneck of land, and this is where the weighbridge has been placed. It is simple enough in theory – the penguin steps onto a weighing platform, its weight is recorded and then it steps off again. In practice it is much harder to obtain accurate weights in this way since measuring the weight of a moving, hopping penguin is a very difficult thing to do. Imagine trying to record the weight a person who was jumping up and down on the weighing scales and you begin to understand the difficulty. If we could somehow persuade the penguins to get onto the weighing platform one at a time and stand still for a few seconds before getting off then the whole thing would be much easier, but alas, the penguins are not this co-operative. Nevertheless, after several years of development and using insanely complicated algorithms, the BAS weighbridge now works extremely well and can accurately weigh a moving penguin to within a few tens of grams. The exact design of the bridge is top secret because, astonishingly, there is more than one group of scientists working on automatic penguin weighing and we don’t want our competitors to steal our ideas.

Catching a wily macaroni penguin.

Weighing a penguin the old-fashioned way.

Stacey demonstrates the 'handbag' method for carrying a penguin.

 As well as weighing the penguin, some vital statistics are taken.

Some macs contemplate crossing the weighbridge.

One at a time, please!

Safely across.

3. Sticking stuff onto penguins.

This summer there is a tracking study being carried out on the gentoo penguins, which involves attaching GPS logging devices to individual birds to find out where they go whilst at sea, and also Temperature-Depth-Recorders to find out where and how deeply they dive. Deploying the devices on incubating birds is fairly straightforward. It is just a case of ambling along to the colony, choosing a penguin that is about to switch places with its partner on the nest, waiting for the changeover to happen and then grabbing the partner and attaching the devices before it heads out to sea. Attaching the devices is a two person job. One penguin wrangler catches the penguin with a net and places a hood over its head, making it look like a tiny little kidnap victim. The penguin is then restrained by straddling it with its head facing out the back, holding its feet with both hands and pressing the flippers against its body using your knees. This gives the second penguin wrangler access to the penguin’s back, where the devices are attached using a combination of tape, glue and cable-ties. The penguin then has a number painted onto its chest using black hair dye (which will disappear when the penguin moults later in the season), making it easier to identify, and is released. Job done and home in time for tea. However, when the devices need to be retrieved a few days later there is no choice but to go to the colony and wait for the particular tagged penguins to return. Penguins don’t keep to strict timetables, and device retrieval, we soon discovered, can involve waiting for up to six hours in the icy cold, silently willing the next penguin that comes out of the sea to be the one with a number on its chest. The study is thankfully now complete, and there are fourteen numbered penguins running around the island somewhere. I believe some of them have got together and will be playing a team of chinstraps next month in the South Georgia all-Penguin Amateur Football Championships.

Restraining the penguin.

Attaching a GPS datalogger.

Logger and TDR, securely attached.

Penguin wranglers love their work.

The final indignity - an ID number on the chest.

Penguin number 1, now playing centre-forward.

4. Some pictures unrelated to the text but still featuring penguins.

A partially moulted gentoo chick.

Large gentoo chicks relentlessly pursue the adults, begging for food.

Obi-wan has taught you well, but you are not a penguin wrangler yet.

Actually it is a device for reading the electronic implants which some of the penguins have.

A macaroni penguin with its chick.

The dangers of falling over when you are still fluffy.

Relaxing on a sunny day.

This penguin wrangling business is a piece of cake.

Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Fur Seals

Antarctic fur seals are lucky enough to own a luxurious, thick, warm, furry coat; just the thing when you live somewhere as prone to bouts of chilliness as Antarctica. Unfortunately for the seals, at some point in the 19th century fashionable ladies decided that a luxurious, thick, warm, furry coat would be just the thing to keep you warm on a chilly day in, say, New York as well. So pretty soon ships full of rugged men were heading towards the islands of the Southern Ocean to remove the coats from their original owners and bring them back, a task which they executed with tremendous vigour and efficiency. In the four years following their discovery in 1918, over 320,000 Antarctic fur seal pelts were taken from the South Shetland Islands alone. By the end of the 19th century the Antarctic fur seal had been hunted to the brink of extinction, with only a few relict populations, numbering perhaps a few tens of individuals, remaining. Fur seals were only saved from total annihilation by the forces of economics – with so few left it became commercially unviable to hunt them, and the sealers turned their attention to whales instead. Bad news for the whales, but good news for the seals, which set about staging one of the most miraculous recoveries in the history of human-animal interactions. Today, the population of Antarctic fur seals is somewhere in the region of 4 million, and 95% of these breed on South Georgia. However, walking across a beach on Bird Island at the height of seal breeding season one might be forgiven for thinking that all 4 million seals were on that particular beach at that exact moment.

The view from our front window:

3rd November

6th November

18th November

3rd December

5th December

13th December

Male Antarctic fur seals come ashore in October and November with one intention only; to have sex with as many lady seals as they possibly can. The best way to do this is to hold a territory close to the shore – like all women, lady seals enjoy lounging around on the beach, and so males will vastly increase their chances of reproductive success by having some beach-front property. Since seals have not yet invented currency and property laws and estate agents, the only way for them to achieve this is to sit on the piece of land that they want and fight off any other seals, or indeed anything else, that tries to set foot on it. Getting a spot early is a good tactic, which is why the males arrive first and spend several weeks defending a patch of empty space. Being enormous and ferocious also helps, and the best territories are held by the biggest and meanest males, the ‘beachmasters’. Negotiating the beaches of Bird Island in October and November thus becomes more and more challenging with each passing day, as more and more seals haul out. Male fur seals can weigh up to 400lbs and have teeth like a Rottweiler. Despite having flippers for legs they can move very fast across flat ground, and at this time of year they are so jacked up on testosterone that they are pretty much constantly in ‘kill’ mode. Fights between neighbouring seals are frequent, violent and often bloody. Walking amongst them is a lively experience. Imagine wandering through the middle of a pack of enormous, angry dogs and you’re getting somewhere close. From about mid-October onwards it is impossible to leave the house unless you are armed with a long stick to fend off seal attacks. The stick works pretty well; most males will stop and back down if you poke them in the chest or touch their whiskers. Nevertheless, the first few times a 400lb male fur seal charges at you, fangs bared, growling and snarling like some demon from the nether regions of Hell, and all that stands between you and him is a wooden stick, which suddenly feels like a matchstick in your hand, then your heart rate hits about 500bpm and you know the meaning of the word terror.

Fur seals! They have sharp bits!

None shall pass.

Border skirmishes are frequent...

...and violent.

Fur seals that are not big enough to hold beach territories make their way up the hills into the tussock, where they like to hide in hollows and under grass, ready to leap out and surprise unwary passers-by. Though not quite as large as the beachmasters, these ‘lurkers’ are no less aggressive. The tussock is uneven and slippery and muddy, so when a tussock seal charges you there is the added frisson that you might at any moment lose your footing, sink up to your knees in the mud and then be trapped there while the seal chews your face off. At least these are the images that flash through my mind when I’m walking about the island. I’m not saying it’s ever actually happened.

A lovely surprise in the tussock.

New males to break through the line of beachmasters by charging up the stream at full gallop.

It's hard work being a male fur seal.

Eventually the females arrive and start to fill up the gaps between the males. Soon the beach becomes impassable, unless you are very brave, or dangerously insane, or a seal biologist. Most females are heavily pregnant when they arrive, and will give birth almost immediately. They stay with their pup for just a week or so before heading back to sea and only return to feed it from time to time. It is during this narrow window of opportunity that the males must attempt to impregnate the females. Females are jealously guarded, lest they sneak off and have an affair with a neighbouring male, and a male with one or two females in his territory is even more jumpy and dangerous than a lone male. Once he has about 15 females to watch over, however, he becomes so preoccupied with keeping them rounded up that he might not even notice you walking past.

A couple of beachmasters and their harems.

A seal biologist braves the beach.

Some female seals in front of the base.

All the fighting finally pays off.

By early January, most of the pups have been born and most of the females have returned to sea to feed. Some males are still hanging around, just in case there is any last minute lovin’ to be had, but they are a shadow of their former selves. After three months of fasting and fighting they are skinny and battered, with barely enough energy to roll an eyeball in your direction and give a half-hearted growl as you pass by. Eventually they will drag themselves back out to sea, to spend a year eating and recovering their strength ready for next year’s breeding season. When they return next October they will be big, fat, angry and ready to scare the bejesus out of innocent penguin biologists once again.

Sleepy females on the front steps.

Surrounded!

Our barbecue is currently out of action.

Fur seals are masters of disguise.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta'