Life after rain

September 18, 2015 at 11:25 pm

Finally a break in the weather. Up until lunchtime we had fish swimming past the living room windows of our Neils Beach domicile. But within half an hour or so it all disappeared and made room for blue skies. And sunshine, actual real sunshine! Miracles do happen!

In the morning Ursula and Junishi drove down to Queenstown to pick up Klemens Pütz from the airport. Jun will be heading back to Dunedin. Klemens will take care of the Jackson Head tawaki tracking when we head over to Milford Sound in about two weeks.

Hotte and I borrowed a ute from Geoff Robson, the owner of Greenstone Helicopters who has been supporting the Tawaki Project since its beginning. We headed out to Jackson Head after lunch. Over the course of three hours we did a nest check run at Popi’s Plaza and the Hilltop area. No more nest failures to report, which is great! The sun did its thing to make the bush bashing actually an enjoyable past-time.

Ursula and Klemens only returned to Neils Beach around 10pm so that we had to scrap the idea of deploying more loggers tonight. However, with Klemens we have a true penguin tracking pioneer in our team so that we can work in two groups and get twice the amount of penguins fitted with loggers in the next few days.