Rainy

The last tawaki to be fitted with a satellite tag on East Shelter Is, and therefore, the last of our ‘normal’ moulters, is a lovely female that occupied one of the two caves at Richard’s honey pot site. Like most other females, she was a calm and cooperative bird that under any other circumstances would have provided the team with a relaxed deployment experience.

But the weather, that developed into a major distraction during Sheldon’s deployment, turned for the worse. Not only kept the wind picking up every minute, but the team was plagued by the bane of device deployments – rain.

On penguins, external devices like dive loggers and satellite tags are attached using the so called ‘Tesa-tape-Method’. It utilizes a special kind of adhesive tape that is threaded under the penguins’ back feathers with the sticky side of the tape facing up. Several rows of tape strips are attached to the feathers before finally the device is placed on the bird and the loose ends of the tape then slung around the unit. A brilliant method that was developed first on penguins in Antarctica.

Problem is, in Antarctica it does not rain, but in New Zealand it does. Especially in Fiordland. Raindrops hitting the sticky side of the tape strips remove all the stickiness, making the tape useless for device attachment.

Thomas was busy arranging the tape strips on the penguins’ lower back when thick drops started to fall. Panicking, Thomas tried to shield the tape with his hands while barking orders to “get a raincoat or something, I dunno!!!”

A few seconds later, a rather intimate situation had developed between Thomas, Myrene and the penguin as all three were huddled under a green oilskin jacket, while operating in the light of head torches, halfway decently protected from the rain. As if on cue, the rain stopped again once the satellite tag was wrapped up securely in the tape and the top layer of epoxy needed to be applied.

This deployment could have been a nightmare, if the penguin would have not been so cooperative. Rainy, an obvious choice for a name, was calm and content on Myrene’s lap throughout the entire procedure. Richard returned Rainy to her cave and while the team rushed head over heels to the landing site to get off the island, Rainy calmly preened the feathers around her device and walked back into her lair.

That evening, Rainy took a wee trip down to the water, swam a few laps around the island before heading back in for a good night’s rest. She continued to go on several day trips before finally embarking on her winter journey in the morning of 28 February. Like Sheldon, she followed a more or less straight southwestern trajectory, stopping occasionally for a day or two, presumably to utilize a prey patch she encountered on the way.

For the past week she has been doodling around in a reasonably small area some 700 km west of Macquarie Is.