October 2014

I headed out at 9am and made my way up to the tent below the apartment building. I knew that Hongo-san had used a deer stalkers tent to film penguin up close. And I knew that it had worked perfectly. I could not imagine that Hongo-san would carry out the tent if he knew that he would use it again when they return to continue filming in late October. So it must have been packed away in the director’s tent.

And it was. I grabbed it and a couple battery driven of insect repellent vaporisers as well as a can of spray on insect repellent and headed down to the beach.

A deer stalkers hide tent is nothing more than a small teepee shaped tent, just big enough to put a chair in. It has viewing stripes on the sides and two entrances at front and back that can be opened just wide enough for a rifle barrel to stick out – or binoculars. I pitched the tent close to the overhang where the bird had spotted me yesterday. A folding chair and the installation of the vaporisers completed my mission.

Spot the hide tent – it works on the penguins too

I made myself comfortable in the chair, zipped up the front door and started scanning the ocean for penguins while occasionally going through our trail camera data on my wee notebook.

I couldn’t resists the temptation of taking a selfie while working on our trail cam data in the hide tent

Today was a hazy but surprisingly warm day. A constant trickle of penguin returned to Jackson Head all through the morning and past lunch time. Several hundred meters our at sea I saw that the sooty shearwaters had returned, probably heading South for their breeding grounds on the Snares. I spotted a whale fluke and a blow, probably a Southern right whale. Then the sun came out and a large pod of Dusky dolphins started playing out there, jumping high out of the water and splashing and frolicking about.

They could not distract me from my quest, though.

The sea was exceptionally calm. Hardly a ripple on the ocean. I could see penguins long before they landed. They would hang around at the surface about 100-200m offshore just where they crayfishermen had set their pots. Some of the birds were having a bath, swimming on their backs, preening their bellies.

None of them had a logger though.

The notebook on my lap I reviewed the time lapse footage from the Creek beach access. The camera placement combined with the motion sensor activated seems perfect. And, at 1.30am in the morning… there she was, standing right in front of the camera.

Actually it looks as if she is holding the device into the lens while cheekily looking over her shoulder as if to say “You want this? Huh? You want this?”

https://vimeo.com/109222171

Next I looked through the images of the nest camera (I had grabbed the SD card from the camera while I was up getting the hide tent). She arrived just after 2am at her nest, where her chick had assumed its post only half an hour before. Until 5.30am she fed and preened the chick and headed off again, presumably back out at sea. Unfortunately, our beach camera ran out of juice around 5.45am so that we probably missed her when she left the Heads.

Our female logger tawaki feeding her chick at 2.50am

Since she had spent around three days out at sea, I doubted we’d see her today. But we still had another penguins to wait for, the male.

Hotte relieved me around 1pm assumed his new post inside the stalker’s tent hide.

I headed back to Neil’s Beach where I started to clean up things in the house. Plan is to leave the day after tomorrow.

I went back to the beach just before 6pm. It had turned into a misty day. Hotte headed back to the car and I watched for penguins with loggers on their backs.

I did not sit for long, when a logger bird jumped out of the water onto the rocks!

I called Hotte on the radio but he was already at the track entrance. Probably too far away to help me get that bird. And get this bird I would!

It was not the female. One look at the impressive honker and I knew I had the male Tawaki in front of me. Just like the female yesterday seemed a bit wearier than the penguins around him. He kept on looking in every possible direction, but the stalker tent seemed to be doing the trick.

The male tawaki from nest JH14 with the logger that is about to be recovered

In a group of three birds, the penguin started to march uphill and disappeared behind a large rock. A minute later two birds re-emerged on the other side of the rock. None of them had a logger.

“So, you like to play games, huh? Well, I can wait.”

Under no circumstances would I leave the tent until the logger bird was way up the rocks so that retreat into the water would not be an option any longer. At least that was the plan.

The two other penguins started preening themselves. Extensively. A seemingly endless process of readjusting every single feather in their plumage bending their necks in the most impossible ways in the process.

Where was the logger bird? Was it still behind that rock! If only I could see…

Then finally the two preening queens started moving and disappeared up in the creek. Our logger bird still made no move.

“Okay. If you want it this way, you can have it!” I mumbled and climbed out of the stalker’s tent. I carefully climbed over the rocks down to where I thought the logger bird must be, spring balance and weighing bag in hand. Oh so slowly I peeked around the rock behind which the bird had disappeared 20 minutes ago and found… nothing.

The bird wasn’t there! How on earth could he have disappeared! Not again!

I searched every crevasse, every nook and cranny in the rocks. Nothing. He must have gone back to sea.

Angry that I had let him win another round I retreated into the tent. I was fuming! How on earth are we supposed to recapture logger birds in this terrain? We can only capture then if we see them. But if we see them it seems the penguins see us as well. And after the handling procedure to attach the loggers, they are apparently not very keen to go through with this a second time.

While I was still cursing and swearing, a penguin with a logger attached to its back just hopped out of the water together with another loggerless penguins.

I waited. Exactly the same game as before, two penguins disappear behind a rock, but only one bird shows up at the other end.

I waited. The other penguin preened.

I waited. The other penguin headed up the hill and disappeared in the creek.

I waited. I kept a close eye on the water this time. I was absolutely sure that the penguin had not gone back into the water. More penguins arrived, headed halfway up the beach, preened and disappeared.

“Okay, okay! You win!” Once again I grabbed spring balance and weighing bag and climbed down to the rock where the logger bird had disappeared. Only this time, he was still there when I arrived!

The penguin hunched underneath a rock and when approached, he scurried further down a gap between the rocks. By the time I was on my knees he had disappeared again.

I circled the rocks under which the penguin must have been hiding. And then I spotted a foot and a flipper poking out of a 10 cm wide crack. I crawled towards it and was greeted by a hiss and a peck when I tried to feel my way towards the penguin. Could I pull it out of there? No, not really, the gap was too narrow even for a small bird like a Tawaki. The penguin would fight during any extraction attempt, not to mention what he would do to my fingers while I tried to so. No, no chance I would get him out.

1:0 for the penguin.

However, I did not give up that easily. I took off my right leather glove and offered it to the penguin with my left. He took a bite and tried to pull it into the crevasse but of course I did not let got. While he was busy with our little tug-o-war I gently grabbed his tail and pulled his lower back closer towards the through the gap. There was the logger!

With one hand I started to peel off the tape which was harder than I thought. It was almost impossible. Then an astonishing thing happened.

The penguin stopped pulling the glove. In fact, it was as if he knew what I was trying to do because he turned slightly so that the device on his back was now poking through the gap! I could actually use both my hands to remove the logger. I could not believe it when I held the device in my hands.

“There you go, wasn’t that bad, was it?” I muttered when I retreated from the rock.

It was a solid draw. The penguin managed to avoid being handled and weighed a second time, but I still got the logger back. I retreated to the tent and needed the next half hour to cam my nerves. I hadn’t even noticed how pumped up I got during the logger recovery. And I am sure that our logger bird would have needed just as long to recover from this as I did.
When I left the tent just after 9pm, I checked the rock with the night vision scope. The penguin was gone. He once again disappeared without me noticing it. However, I did not blame him for this and wished him best of luck for the rest of the breeding season.

“There you go, wasn’t that bad, was it?” I muttered when I retreated from the rock.

It was a solid draw. The penguin managed to avoid being handled and weighed a second time, but I still got the logger back. I retreated to the tent and needed the next half hour to calm my nerves. I hadn’t even noticed how pumped up I got during the logger recovery. And I am sure that our logger bird would have needed just as long to recover from this as I did.

When I left the tent just after 9pm, I checked the rock with the night vision scope. The penguin was gone. He once again had disappeared without me noticing it. However, I did not blame him for this and wished him best of luck for the rest of the breeding season.

Let me spell it out. This was the most frustrating day of all!

A logger bird returned, unfortunately in too many ways. Because first it returned to Jackson Head, but then it spotted me – or rather my head poking out from behind a rock – and then it decided to return to the ocean.

And it did this twice!

Around 6pm I spotted a bird with an obvious lump its back in the white water close to the rocks just below the Creek beach access. I followed its movement with my binoculars. The bird landed fashioning a data loggers on its lower back. It moved very carefully and observant. While other penguins that had landed seemed to go about their daily business as per usual, the logger bird appeared weary. As if it knew we were waiting.

It twisted its head very way and then it made eye contact with me, turned around and jumped back into the water.

The sinking feeling of defeat! How on earth could the penguin have spotted me? I mean, I tried to stay hidden as much as possible, but of course if I want to see something, I have to stick my head out. At least a bit.

I calmed my nerves by retreating further up the rocks and crouched under an overhanging rock. With the binoculars I scanned the water surface. Yes, there it was! The logger bird was still out there and it would make another attempt to come ashore. All was not lost. In the distance more and more penguins appeared on the rocky shore. Yes, she would come back.

Tawaki on the rocks, just not the one we’re waiting for

I remained squeezed underneath the overhang, tried not to move despite ferocious attacks by sandflies and peered through the binoculars. 15 minutes passed, 30 minutes. And I lost sight of the logger bird.

All of a sudden she was below us (I was fairly confident it was the female) out on the rocks with another Tawaki. Again, she looked in every possible direction while her companion (no logger) comfortably settled on a rock and started to preen itself extensively.

I did not move. I did not lower my binoculars. Heck, I don’t think I even breathed.

And what did she do? Make eye contact and – zoom! – off she went back into the ocean. And this time she did not re-emerge. She was gone for good and would not return tonight.

I was flabbergasted. How on earth did she know I was there? For all I knew I was just another rock wedged under another overhanging rock. I had paid for my patience with about 500 new sandfly bites which would remind me about this defeat for the next week or so.

By now darkness had set in. And just to make matters worse, it started to rain. In the rain, the night vision scope turned out to be utterly useless in these conditions as the rain drops would reflect the infrared light to create a blinding spectacle of sparks in the view finder. Spotting a penguin let alone one with a tiny data logger attached to its back was impossible. And actually, same applied for our head torches.

No point hanging out here any longer. We had to accept defeat. The penguin won this round. Well played, well played.

However, we now know that we are waiting at just the right spot for our penguins. No doubt about that. And we still have another joker up our sleeves.

I will play it first thing tomorrow morning!

Nothing happened, just like yesterday. Another day out on the rocks, waiting and looking for any sign of logger birds. We have now shifted our focus on the creek beach access where we expect our last two logger birds to return at some stage.

If the logger bird does not show up, I’ll just take photos of other birds.

I am starting to give up hope that we will see the Hilltop female again. Either we are waiting at the wrong access point or she is returning at such odd hours that we keep o missing her. The trail camera we have placed at the Hilltop beach access does not help much either as the penguins do not stay long enough in frame for the 1 minute time lapse setting (the shortest available) can reliably record every bird that heads up the hill.

Perhaps the logger has fallen off already which of course makes detecting our female impossible; the attached device is the only way we can identify our bird.

So here we are, hoping to have more luck with our last two logger birds. But our luck must still be on its way as we did not see anything of those birds either.

Ursula will head back to Dunedin first thing tomorrow morning. So it will be up to Hotte and me to get our birds back in the next few days.

We got out just after 3am this morning. Yes, it was a beautiful moonlit night. But it was also bloody cold out on the rock we were marooned on until the tide finally allowed us to head out to the car. I was zombified after 10 hours out on the rocks without anything to eat other than a couple of muesli bars. Boy, was I glad to finally jump into the truck and head home where our beds were waiting for us.

What else is left to say about this day? We spent another long day and evening out below the Hilltop beach access waiting for our logger bird to return which again did not happen. Ursula and Hotte took turns while I spent the entire time out watching, waiting and hoping that our bird might return. By now the device’s batteries are surely exhausted so there is really no point for the bird to keep on carrying the device any longer. All she has to do is turn up and we’ll relieve her of her excess baggage.

But, alas, she prefers to elude us.

While we waited at Hilltop beach we also kept an eye on the Creek beach access. Who knows, perhaps one of the bird we fitted loggers on last night would show up tonight. I wasn’t sure what we would do in that case. Get the logger off after one day (as this might be our only chance to get the device back)? Or leave the bird in peace and hope to see him or her again on one of the following days (to maximize the data outcome of the deployment)?

Hotte manning the combined Hilltop/Creek lookout post

Well, that problem also solved itself as neither of the other two logger birds showed up.

Don’t look at me! Look for the logger bird!

The last week of this season’s field work is upon us. And we decided to deploy two more i-gotUs. Best time would be sometime in the middle of the night when presumably the majority of birds had returned to their nests, most of which are deserted during the day. That way we could combine waiting and looking out for our Hilltop logger bird in the afternoon and evening with the logger deployments.

Aprés-swim – there’s nothing nicer than an evening preen

The wait and look-out it quickly summarised – we did not see our bird and consequently get the logger back. I really start to wonder whether we are looking at the right spot for her. This is a problem we need to tackle a bit better next year. How we are going to do that… well, I’m still working on it.

Another lovely sunset over Smoothwater Point

However, by know we know that the creek access below the apartment block and arena areas is one of the busiest access routes which I would consider a good indication that this is the only access to the aforementioned areas. Based on this assumption we decided to deploy our loggers at the apartment block. Apart from the fact that the nests are reasonably accessible there, it would be pretty cool if we could provide Ida-san with some first-hand information on what the penguins they have been filming were up to out at sea.

But first I decided that we have a quick look up on Hilltop to see whether our logger bird might have returned to their nest without us noticing it. The climb up to the breeding area high above the sea was quite serene with a full moon rising into a starry clear sky. The view from our logger bird’s nest overlooking the Tasman Sea was spectacular. Unfortunately our bird must have been less interested in the fine views. She wasn’t there. Neither were her partner or chick.

We headed over to the apartment block. There was quite some noise, which was a good sign. Ursula peeked over the rocky ledge in front of the apartment and whispered “There are males and females with the chicks. Looking good.”

We had two loggers that were programmed to start recording at 4am tomorrow morning. We decided to fit the devices to a female and a male. If we managed to get data from both deployments we’d also have an indication if we can expect sex differences in foraging behaviour. Considering that females are principally the sole suppliers of food for their chick (at this stage anyhow) this could almost be expected. The males had fasted for more than four weeks during incubation and chick-guard, so there would be quite some catching up to do for them.

Ursula swiftly moved in and out and returned with a female on her arm that wasn’t too impressed with what was happening. She fought furiously packing at Ursula and trying to slap her with her flippers. And all that for less than 15 inconvenient minutes that involved weighing her (2900 grams, good weight compared to the other females we’ve handled which were all around 2500 grams) and attaching the epoxied i-gotUs.

When I attached the loggers to the bird’s back feathers I realised how small the GPS loggers actually were. There was hardly enough room to wrap three stripes of tape around them. So I made extra sure that every millimetre of tape stuck really well to the device. I don’t want to lose another one because it falls off. I also decided not to use rubber glue to seal the tape after the logger was neatly attached to the penguin’s lower back. The rubber glue helps to extend the period the device is going to stay on the bird. But considering the problems we have recapturing our Hilltop bird I think I’d rather have the device fall off in one or two weeks’ time than having the bird swim around with it for a month or so. And since we’ll have to recover the devices in the next week anyhow, there is no point for a rubber glue seal.

Once the attachment procedure was over, I crawled up to the nest sites, deployed a nest camera and grabbed what looked like the female’s neighbour, a male penguin. Boy, did he give me a beating! I mean, he had all the right to do so, but did he have to latch onto me with his beak and twist? He gave me a really good bruise that I can still feel while I’m sitting here writing this.

While I weighed the adult, Ursula released the female into her nest. The bird did not take any chances and fled into the cave where several chicks huddled together guarded by a bunch of adults that looked like they would much rather huddle up with the chicks than form a protective wall of penguins around them.

Attaching the device to the male went just as smoothly as with the female. While I was busy with wrapping the logger up with tape, I muttered to Ursula “You know what? I think this guy might actually be the mate of the female we just equipped.”

Ursula released the male penguin and we quickly retreated down to the film crew’s tent. Ursula checked her watch.

“It’s going to be a close call with the tide.”

It was already going on midnight. With high tide being just before 1am it would be difficult to climb around some of the bluffs to get back to the track to the car park. That we had a full moon would not help either.

We pushed through the kiekie and started the steep climb down the ropes to the beach. I was just about to lower myself down the last bit of rope when I heard a bark below me. I looked down and in the light of my head torch I spotted a female fur seal sitting just where I would come down. There was what looked like goo on the rocks next to her. She looked up at me turned to run away, but thought about it a second time and turned around and crept back towards the goo.

What was that? I focussed on the goo and only now noticed that the brown stains around it was blood. And half hidden beneath another rock I saw the small, wet behind of a much smaller fur seal. Or rather – a sea lion baby and the goo was the placenta! The female fur seal had just given birth to a pup!

“Oh shit, we gotta find another way! There is a new born fur seal down here. We don’t want to scare mum away.” I called up to Ursula.

We sidled along the muddy slip that was difficult enough to tackle with a rope. Here we had nothing to hold on to. I don’t know how but we made it down to the rocks about 50m to the right of the fur seal. We gave her a wide berth by climbing past her as far down the rocks as the tide would allow us.

Yes, the tide. By the time we had made our way around past the creek penguin access point the waves were almost crashing up to where the vegetation began. It did not look good for us getting out before tomorrow morning.

We did not. We managed to get to the first bluff. And that’s where we are now, sitting on the rocks, waiting for the tide to go down which is probably another two or three hours. Well, at least it’s not raining. In fact, I’m not sure if one could pick a better night to be bluffed by the tide that this one. And amazing full moon hangs above us turning the sea off Jackson Head into a silvery glittering expanse.

Full moon over Jackson Head

I took a day off. My shoulder and my knee seem to have suffered from the logger bird recovery yesterday. So today I took it slow and sent out Hotte and Ursula to sit and wait for our remaining logger bird.

At 6pm a particularly nasty rain set in and I started to feel really bad for the two. The rain stopped briefly at 7pm but returned with a vengeance at a 7.15pm. And I did not stop until night fall.

The two of them returned around 9.30pm. Without logger. Only a few birds returned while they were crouching behind their rocks in the rain. Perhaps penguins don’t fancy rain?

I guess Ursula and Hotte would not blame them.

As a small compensation for their suffering, the rain stopped after they returned to Neil’s Beach and through a few holes in the fast moving clouds we could see the full moon as it turned brownish-red just before midnight when it passed through the earth’s shadow in a full lunar eclipse.

There#s nothing better than a relaible team – Ursel and Hotte after a wet night at the Head

I decided to expand our observation period. Hotte manned the lookout below Hilltop at 4pm. Plan was to relieve him sometime between 7 and 8pm, before Ursula would join me later.

While the weather had looked far better than what last night’s forecast told us (“hurricane force winds and heavy rain”), it started to get greyer by the minute in the afternoon. By the time the forecast was on just before sever, drizzle had set in which made me feel bad about Hotte out at the Head. The weather forecast was not promising. The storm and rain were just delayed and would hit tonight with around 160mm of rain being expected to fall until 6am tomorrow morning.

Nope, we would not be staying out on the Heads until the middle of the night this time.

I geared up and drove out to the Wharekai Te Kou Walk car park just after 7pm. I arrived at the lookout 20 minutes later. The rocks below the lookout were populated by seven penguins. I radioed Hotte that I would have a look up on the hill so as to not scare the penguins away trying to get to him.

Both out logger nests were still as empty as they had been last night. Beach recovery looks more and more like the only option for us at this stage of breeding. The fact that down there most penguins arrive in darkness and tend to disappear between the rocks does not help at all. During a thorough search of hilltop I noticed that not only most adult penguins had disappeared from their nests, but also that hardly any chick were anywhere in sight. I bet the crèches are somewhere deep in impenetrable kiekie.

Back down on the beach I radioed Hotte again. Apart from three penguin that finally had made it up the hill, nothing had happened with still several Tawaki loitering around on the rocks. The drizzle had turned to solid rain. By now it was dark and the Head a thoroughly unpleasant location to be. I decided to call it a day. However, I had to get over to Hotte to hand him a torch. I slowly snuck around a large rock and caught three penguin preening on the rocks.

One of them was carrying a logger!

“Logger bird! Logger bird!” I croaked into the radio, dropped my backpack and grabbed a penguin bag. When I turned around the penguins were gone! Where was our bird? I climbed around on the rocks and spotter a bird ducking into a crevasse underneath a rock. But, alas, this one had no logger. I kept searching.

I found our bird under another boulder. It was extremely hard to reach, but somehow I managed to grab hold of its legs and pull it out into the open. Just judging from the bird’s behaviour, its resistance and fighting I knew it was the JH13 female. I also knew that on this bird we had used an i-gotU which we had tried to waterproof by simply sealing its original casing with epoxy rather than casting the electronics completely in epoxy (as the JH06 logger and the three we still had at home).

Struggling with the bird in complete darkness and pouring rain made me wonder if all this effort would be rewarded. Sealing the device was a trade-off as at the time we did not know if the loggers would continue to work when cats in epoxy. But it also meant that if water penetrated the casing the electronics would almost certainly be dead.

I carried her over to Hotte where we relieved her of her excess baggage, weighed her and injected a transponder before releasing her. As a farewell gift she gave me a nasty bite. Well deserved, I reckon.

Examination of the logger confirmed my suspicion. It was the JH13 female. It was the “sealed” logger. And shaking the devices close to my ear produced a low slushing sound. Yes, the casing had leaked water. The logger was dead. Crap!

The way back over the rocks was difficult and treacherous. Our logger recovery had taken about half an hour, which meant that the tide was considerably higher. With the approaching storm whipping up waves we were nearly washed of the rocks on a few occasions, with Hotte having to survive a series of nasty falls. Battered and bruised be made it back to Neil’s Beach just after 10pm.

The thing that concerns me is that Hotte could not see the logger on the bird’s back despite having an infrared scope at hand. The devices are too small and too easy to overlook. This coupled with the fact the penguins seldom show you their back for more than a fraction of a second makes it really difficult to determine whether a penguin is carrying a logger or not. Who knows, maybe the logger birds had just walked past us in the previous nights without us noticing a lump on their backs.

That I encountered the bird was a matter of luck. It just happened to stand right in front of me with its back being dead straight in the centre of my head torch’s light beam. It seems that device recovery is more often than not left to chance. We will have to think about alternative ways of locating logger birds for recovery. Adding a radio transmitter to the logger might be a start. I will have to think about that.

We woke up to blue skies and sunshine. A welcome change to yesterday’s downpour. However, it blows a howling south-westerly which throws enormous seas at Neil’s Beach – and no doubt at Jackson Head. With high tide being smack-bang in the middle of the morning, there’s nothing for us to do until later in the afternoon. That’s fine as we’ll have to try to get our logger birds back this afternoon and evening.

So a bit of recreation was in order. Recreation which allowed us to stock up on our bread supplies and to check emails for a change. Since Haast alone has very little else to offer, we decided to take a wee trip to Monro Beach some 80 km North of here and have a look at the dramatic scenery of huge waves crashing over the rock stacks.

Wave monster at Monro Beach

The actual sights far surpassed my expectations. The surf not only crashed over the rock stacks, it all but drowned them. All that illuminated by sunlight in front of a backdrop of dark grey clouds over the horizon… it was the perfect motif for an impressionistic painting.

How the penguins would fare in these conditions was beyond me. And just looking at the horizon I could see that even way out there the waves were breaking creating truly nasty conditions. If I were a penguin, I would not bother with staying at the surface longer than necessary. A breather and I would head back down into depths where the water was less behaving like a washing machine.

https://vimeo.com/109104158

Of course, that idea might have some relevance for our logger data. The shorter the penguins stay at the surface, the less likely it is for the logger to store a fix. And the longer it takes the logger to calculate its position, the more likely it is going to fall back into cold mode. And in cold mode, the logger would need two minutes or more to determine its position. No chance that the penguins would stay that long at the surface in these conditions.

In other words, I was beginning to wonder if our i-gotUs would be able to collect any data in stormy seas such as these ones. So while we had plans to deploy our remaining three loggers tonight, just looking at the seas made me realise that it would not only be unfair for the penguins (who wants to carry a backpack through this mess?) but also pointless if we would expect the devices to not function correctly. So we’ll wait until it’s calmer again.

A purchase of several loafs of bread and checked emails later, we were back at Neil’s Beach with Ursula and I gearing up for a long night out at the Hilltop penguins’ main beach access while Hotte remained in the house to hold to fort. High tide was still three hours away and the waves hitting Jackson Head were pretty rough but we had no problems making our way to our designated lookout.

Ursula on her way to another night of logger bird stalking

At first not a lot happened. So I took the chance to hike up to the Hilltop and have a look at our logger nests and get the SD cards from the cameras that monitored both nests with 1 minute time lapse imagery. JH06 was… empty. No adult, no chick. Oh dear. JH13? Also empty. Oh no. Had we picked exactly the last night of the guard-stage to deploy our loggers?

I headed back down the hill and joined Ursula. We spread out over the rocks to cover more potential access points. It got darker but the nearly full moon illuminated the rocky shore in a way that we could see penguins coming up without the help of our infrared scope or our LED head torches. We sat and waited and shivered until midnight. We spotted around 20 penguins none of which carried a logger on their backs. We were cold and tired and disappointed. And we decided to head back.

We arrived back at Neil’s Beach just after 1am. Before jumping in the shower I had to take a look at the camera data.

At JH06 it seemed as if the female with the logger vanished from the nest shortly after we had released her. She then reappears just after 3am to head downhill her mate in tow just 5 minutes later. The male later returned and spent the first half of the day yesterday with the chick at the nest. The chick then disappears downhill – and has not returned to the nest since. The male popped into the nest off and on, but never hung around for long.

Our logger bird and her mate leave the nest

The second logger bird at nest JH13 on the other hand, stayed at the nest with mate and chick all night obviously not having the whole logger attachment procedure too hard – she slept through most of the night. At 5.23am both our logger bird and her mate left the nest and chick behind. At 7.56am the chick disappears from the nest after having been busy wandering around for the past couple of hours. Since then the nest was left empty with the exceptions of a few short visits by an adult tawaki which I’m not sure was any of the original nest occupants.

https://vimeo.com/109219496

It seems we deployed both loggers on birds that have entered post-guard stage. This means that we will have very little chance to recover the devices at the nest sites. The chicks can wander around and crèche up with other chicks somewhere in the kiekie. Although it is believed that chicks generally return to their nest at night to wait for their parents to return and feed them, our camera data suggests otherwise.

Before we deploy any more loggers we need to establish how likely it is to get the devices back at this stage of breeding. Could be that our new batch of loggers have arrived too late. Sending another small curse about the non-delivery of our GPS dive loggers in time for the fieldwork, I fell asleep.

I hate it when the weather forecast is right about heavy rain. But they hit the nail on the head when they predicted 200-250mm for the West Coast on the news yesterday. It does not rain, it pours. Rain lashes the windows and drums on the roof of our Neil’s Beach retreat. It does not look as if we’re going to do anything out on the Heads today. We’re boxed in left to pursue rare moments of boredom or, alternatively, continue analysing our Bushnell time lapse data which isn’t that much more exciting either.

Oh the joy of clicking through thousands of grainy still images

Talking about boxed in… Hotte finished casting the remaining three i-gotUs in epoxy. Once they’re dry and sanded into a more hydrodynamic shape they are good to go on three more candidates.

Just not in this weather.

Two of the three GPS loggers cast in epoxy resin

A beautiful bit ice-cold day on the West Coast today. In a way the weather was a perfect match for our final attempt to recover our logger bird.

We went in this morning to check the two track cameras observing the penguin landing and the logger nest. As on the previous days the nest was empty. However, when I looked at the camera data after we returned to Neil’s Beach in the afternoon it dawned on me that we had to accept defeat.

Our logger bird had returned to its nest in the night of the 2 September. And unfortunately it looked as if our logger was about to fall off, dangling only on the last couple of trips of tape. The bird left again in the early hours of yesterday and returned again to its nest about two hours before I arrived for my midnight stroll to the Plaza. Obviously the bird had buggered off again before I arrived. However, more importantly, the time lapse footage showed that the penguin had returned without logger. A few ruffled feathers on its back were the final indication that the penguin had been wearing a data logger for a short while.

Why the logger fell off so quickly is a bit of a worry. Usually the attachment method with tape and rubber glue holds for two to three weeks. I guess the cold and wet conditions when we fitted the device all contributed to the fact that the tape did not stick that well. With the bird fleeing the scene probably heading straight into the ocean certainly would not have helped the tape to warm up and stick better to the penguin’s plumage. In the end I guess the device slipped clean off.

However, it’s a real comfort to know my initial worries that we might have caused the female to abandon her mate and chick proved to be unfounded. She did what a good mother does – return to feed her chick. Which means that we have now handled a total of four Fiordland penguins without obvious long-term negative effect for the birds and their offspring. Considering that this was a major concern when we applied for research funding, this is good news.

And now that we have five more i-gotUs available, it makes it a bit easier to accept that we have lost a device.

We used the later afternoon and evening to prepare two i-gotUs for deployment. Rather than taking any chances again by wrapping our devices into condoms to waterproof them, we used epoxy resin to water proof the device casings. In fact, we removed the electronics from one device completely and cast it in Epoxy which we poured in a moult I had fashioned out of Dukit polymer clay. Unfortunately the moult did not survive when we tried to get the GPS logger out, but at least now we have a device which is completely sealed off from any water penetration.

Then we waited. To ensure that we would encounter females for logger deployment, we decided to wait until 10pm before we headed out to the Head. Which Ursula and I did while Hotte held the Fort.

Beneath a clear starry sky, we arrived at the bottom of our rope ascent shortly after 11pm. I decided to give the Plaza penguins a bit of a break and instead pay a visit to our birds up at Hilltop. This also meant that we had a considerable climb to complete. In darkness no mean feat.

We were lucky. We fitted the first device to the female of our camera nest JH06. And we encountered a second female a few metres above that nest and deployed our last i-gotU of the day. Well, actually, by the time we realised the second bird, the new day was three quarters of an hour old already. We made it back to Neil’s Beach just before 2am.

So here we are, moving on with logger deployments #5 and #6.