Field work

And so begins the last week of Tawaki filming. With a long, long drive from Dunedin to Haast.

I actually made it to Haast in a bit over five hours only to find that I left the sunshine behind and dived head first into typical West Coast weather. I quickly checked into the Heritage Hotel, geared up and was just about to leave for the Heads when I spotted Sam sitting in his hotel room.

It turned out that the Japanese film crew took a break today; the weather was abysmal and they decided to do night shifts from now on. Leaving the hotel and 2am to be ready in the penguin colonies if the first chick decide to fledge in the morning.

I actually agree with the idea that it is more likely to film fledglings leaving in the morning, when the majority of adult penguins also take their leave.

Well, I’m after a logger penguin that might still be running around on Jackson Head. So I told Sam that I would be out till late and therefore would join them sometime in the morning tomorrow.

Thank god, the rain cleared just in time!

Less than an hour later I arrived at the Hilltop beach access. On my way across the rocks I came across many juveniles. In fact, most of the penguins loitering on the rocks this evening turned out to be juveniles. Very few penguins in adult plumage were present. I guessed that most of them were somewhere up in the bush. I climbed up the creek to get to nest JH06. The sun peeked through a hole in the clouds and illuminated the Hilltop in golden colours.

…in a nice and cosy sun spot…

On a narrow mud ledge under a fallen log, in a nice and cosy sun spot, I saw a penguin bum minus the typical long tail feathers. Further up the massive body patches of brown fluff quivered in the evening breeze. The bird lay flat on its stomach, the flippers tightly tugged onto the belly, the head slightly raised. I just love to watch penguins that are fast asleep.

A fast asleep chick sporting its new plumage and a feather boa of down

This one was a chick that by the looks of it wasn’t far from fledging.

An adult sat upright hidden in the kiekie not far from the chick, its bill pointing skyward with its eyes closed, also fast asleep. The gentle rumble of the surf, the whispering breeze and the setting sun… this was pure serenity.

I enjoyed the moment a bit longer, then when I was about to quietly retreated down the hill junior got up, stretched and shook is upper body, sending down flying in all directions. Then it hunched down, spotted me and remained decidedly undecided where it was, just looking me up and down. I couldn’t resist and remained a few minutes longer.

“Who are you and where did you come from?”

“Here’s looking at you, kid”

I spent a couple of hours not far from where Haruki-san sat when he saw our logger bird coming up the hill. Needless to say, it didn’t show up while I was there.

After a night in an obscenely large unit of a motel in Invercargill – I had a two floor unit with four beds for myself (the requirement for each member of the film crew to have his own unit is something that never ceases to amaze me) – our troupe drove down to Bluff where we got on board the 9.30am ferry to Stewart Island.

We arrived in Oban, the main settlement on the island, a mere hour later. We were just in time for the rain to set in which made transferring the equipment which had been shipped over in seven large bins (in other words: loads and loads of gear) a real joy.

Luke Simeon, a bearded guy with a dark complexion and green eyes, waited for us with a flat bed truck and helped shuttling the massive amount of gear to the hotel. Luke is a commercial Paua diver and crayfisherman. His fishing boat Stingray will be our floating base and has ample room to store all the diving equipment and filming gear. His fishing buddy Morgan will be acting skipper on Luke’s boat given that Luke potentially will spent considerable amount of time in the water with the two camera men.

In theory that would sum up the day adequately, if it wasn’t for what came out during the dinner I had with the crew at the hotel restaurant.

Now, one thing that I feel was a bit of an issue these last days, was that I spent hardly any time with the guys outside after our daily work in the field. Since the return of the film crew, I had hardly spent time with them outside the field. The days were too long and we always left early in the morning and returned late at night. So we had pretty little time to a chat over breakfast or dinner about what was going on and how we would continue the work.

So in a sense here on Stewart Island we had the first evening the team spent together since the crew returned from Japan. Finally some time to catch up on the things that happened in the past week and which are planned for the next few days.

Just to avoid confusion from here on: we have finally found a solution for our double Ida-san problem (i.e. the director vs the cameraman). We call Ida-san (the cameraman) by his first name, which makes him Haruki-san.

Anyhow, there we were having the first proper dinner together and Haruki-san asked me how deep Tawaki would dive (Sam translated.)

‘We don’t really know yet, but we will find out next year, when we will have dive loggers’, I replied.

Haruki-san raised his eyebrows. “But you have devices on the birds. I saw it.”

“Yes”, I replied. “But this year we have only GPS loggera available that do not record dive depths. We got the last logger back a couple of weeks… hang on… you saw what?!?”

“When I was filming in the forest. A bird with a logger on the back came walking up the path. I filmed it so we can show you.”

My jaw hit the table in astonishment. He had seen the final missing logger bird! He had even filmed it for me!! And I only find out about it by accident days later when we are on Stewart Island??? I turned to Sam.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell Haruki-san about the logger. So he didn’t know what to do”, Sam apologised who I had instructed to brief all the team members about our final logger bird up on Hilltop. They were to give me a call the moment they saw the bird.

Guess my instructions got lost in translation. Doh!

Well, opportunity lost. At least I know what to do when we get back to Haast – sit in the forest to catch our last missing logger bird.

Sitting on a desk all day is quite nice sometimes, but usually I prefer field work. A lot. And today was a prime example why that is so.

For most of the day the weather was gorgeous. Hongo-san was back in business, the two Ida-san’s and Sam were back from filming Tawaki swimming in creeks. Today they wanted to get footage of penguins landing on the beach and making their way up to the colonies.

Of course they are lucky as at the moment, a lot more penguins land on Jackson Head than there are breeders. That’s because a lot of young birds – juveniles and pre-breeders (according to Warham Tawaki start to breed when 5-7 years old) – are returning from almost 10 months at sea. So the traffic on the beach is considerable.

The two Ida-sans have moved a bit further along the rocky shore to one of the busiest landings some 200 metres past our rope ascent to the Apartment block. At first I wasn’t sure about them filming there as there seemed to be an awful lot of fur seals there. But when I checked the area I could confirm that these were just male animals that had a rest in the spring sun. And pretty much unlike your ordinary fur seal, they did not mind the camera man and documentary director at all. Instead they actually posed, staged a bull fight and generally gave the guys a great show to ban on film (or rather hard disks).

I spent most of the afternoon sitting high up on a rock overlooking Jackson Head West. Had the penguin traffic in the previous weeks been a bit slow an restricted to the main colony access points, the Tawaki now landed around us anywhere and at any time. As far as one could see we’d spot penguins preening, hopping on the rocks or just dozing in the sun.

Dozing in the evening sun (actually, this guy might be fast asleep)

As it was getting darker I decided to head up to the Apartment block to have a look at Hongo-san’s filming efforts there. He wanted to give filming with artificial lights a go. I had agreed to that because if one thing became clear in the past weeks then that when it’s dark Tawaki could not care less about being in the spotlight of a head torch. It’s as if they don’t eve perceive the artificial light.

It was already quite gloomy up in the forest and Hongo-san had just switched on a LED panel that illuminated the Apartment Block. Only problem was that there weren’t any penguins in sight. The chicks and guarding adults were all back in the cave and none of the parents had returned yet to feed their chicks.

I clambered up the slope to where Hongo-san had squeezed himself and his enormous camera into the tent hide. I looked around and thought that the almost horizontal branch above and a bit behind the tent hide would make an excellent perch and vantage point to observe the show. I quietly climbed up the tree and found a really comfortable position up there. The Apartment block lay like a stage in front of me. Now we just had to wait until the prelude was over and the play would commence.

The view from my perch onto the illuminated stage in front of the Apartment Block

At first not a lot happened. A chick was heard issuing begging calls somewhere from the depths of the kiekie at the top of the Apartment block. The high pitched “weep-weep-weep” in my opinion was enough to make any caring living being want to regurgitate some food. Apparently the adult penguins that certainly were present somewhere in the shadows thought otherwise.

Yet the stage remained deserted. From time to time I saw some movement in front of Hongo-san’s tent hide, but it always turned out to be the lens of the 4K camera moving this way or that way to film the vast emptiness of the lit Apartment block.

After about an hour of sitting and waiting and just letting the mind drift, a male Tawaki waddled out of the overhanging kiekie leafs that covered the left side of the Apartment block like a stage curtain. He moved to the centre of the stage in the slender walk posture that is so commonly seen in Snares penguins – both flippers pointing forwards with a craned neck as if the penguin wanted to duck under some hidden obstacle. Then suddenly he stopped, stretched his neck and looked to the left, looked to the right, stood like that motionless for a few seconds. And then, as if he realised that no other penguin was watching his shoulders dropped, the flippers relaxed and he retracted his head looking slightly bedraggled. After a while he shook his body and moved off to disappear behind the kiekie again.

It started to feel as if the penguins suffered from a case of stage fright. So far they seemed to prefer to stay behind the kiekie curtains or the depth of the backstage area which was the cave. But around 10pm they got over that and the show finally started.

First a couple of chicks, their downy brown baby suits smothered in mud, wandered out of the cave and onto the stage. They apparently aimlessly moved from one side to the other and back until they finally seemed to have honed in on their destination and settled at their respective nest sites. There they sat and waited, occasionally flapping their wings that looked at least a couple of sizes too long despite the fact that the chicks were already quit big. T

Then a female tawaki arrived from the front left and entered the lit area. Its plumage was still wet and without hesitation it headed to chick number which immediately started begging with a high pitched peeping and rhythmic head shakes. The female gave a short but sharp trumpeting display to quickly turn her attention to her chick. To indicate its readiness for food it brought its head upwards from below her bill which required quite some contortion skills on the chick’s behalf as it was almost as tall as its mother. She opened her bill and the chick did not hesitate to poke what looked like its entire head into her mother’s throat.

Whenever I see penguins feed their chicks I do value the human way of feeding babies. Just imagine Mums would have to pre-digest and then vomit up the food for their offspring. What a mess this would create.

However, nothing was wasted here. The chick emerged again from its mother’s gape and both raised their heads to gulp down the bits and pieces that remained in their mouths. I peered through my binoculars in the hope to see what kind of food was transferred between mother and child, but not even a trace of the regurgitated meal was visible. Not 15 seconds after the feeding was completed the chick started begging again and the whole process was repeated. All in all I counted 7 feeding events before the mother decides to move of her nest and start preening right in front of Hongo-san’s camera.

Hongo-san was happy. Not long after the feeding show was over I saw him put the lens cap onto is camera and crawl out of the tent hide. He stretched his back looked up and saw me in the dim light of the LED panel sitting up the tree and released a piercing cry “HAAII!!” Apparently he had not expected to see me – or any other life-form – perched high up in the tree above him. His flight instinct almost made him jump of the ledge and down into the darkness but he gained control again and mumbled something like “Ohh, you scared me”.

Yet another form of stage fright, I thought.

A week with the family in Dunedin and here I am again, back in Haast. Today the Japanese film crew around Ida-san returns for the second stint of Tawaki filming at Jackson Head.

Well, that was the plan anyhow. I got a late start in Dunedin so no time for a lunch break as I had to make it across the Haast Pass and the Diana Falls before 6pm. And while I made it, my Japanese companions did not.

Not long after I checked in at the Heritage Hotel, my phone rang. The receptionist told me that the rest of the crew will be spending their night in Makarora until the road has opened again.

Oh well, no Tawaki briefing tonight then.

Just a quick note jotted down before we head across the Alps and back to Dunedin.

This morning we finished the second half of the camera run. Now the devices have to operate for a bit more than a week without our care. I will return for a second stint of filming with the Japanese film crew in the last week of October. But I am sure that the batteries will last until then.

Last descent from Hilltop before heading back to Dunedin

While it was rather gray when we finished our camera maintance, it has turned into a glorious blue-sky-and-sunshine day. Perfect house cleaning weather. Now, I will spare you the details of what we all cleaned. Suffice to say that it took us all day and now we have to rush back to Haast to make it past the Diana Falls slip before they close the road on us!

My alarm clock went off at a humane 7am this morning. But it did not take me long to convince myself that it was quite alright to have another wee snooze before getting up. Outside it was bucketing down.

And it kept on doing for most of the morning. So rather than assuming a lookout in the hide tent, Hotte and I busied ourselves with getting the house cleaned up, for today was the last full day of this year’s field work for the Tawaki Project.

After lunch the rain had turned into occasional drizzle showers so we had no further excuses but geared up and headed out to the Heads.

The plan for today was simple. Hotte would keep an eye on the coast while I did the first half of the camera run. Since we had to replace batteries in most of the cameras, this would keep me busy for quite a while.

Hotte on the lookout for our logger bird

The forest was dripping wet and particularly getting up to the Hilltop area was treacherous to say the least. I struggled with batteries that would not come out of the trail cams and cursed the flimsy straps with which I had to tie the cameras to rocks, trees or any other, less suitable form of vegetation. It all took longer than I thought.

Back at the apartment block I carefully approached the camera just in case our logger female was at home. But she wasn’t. That was okay. I was expecting her to return from a foraging trip today anyhow and Hotte kept a close eye on who arrived and whether they were carrying any additional freight. He would have called me over the radio if anything happened.

The deserted apartment block – well, actually there is a crèche of six chicks in the cave

After a couple of hours I finally ran out of batteries and SD cards; today’s camera run was done.The penguins checking out the guy fiddling with the cameras were certainly glad when I decided to call it a day up here in the nesting area.

Checking out the annoying camera dude

I headed down the rope to the rocky shore. However, rather than going back to the hide, I decided to crawl into a cave-like overhang – it was drizzling again – and get the small laptop from my pack and have a look at the beach camera as well as the logger nest camera data.

No trace of the logger bird on any of last night’s trail camera images sitting at the Creek beach access. As predicted. I started to flick through the nest camera data.

The radio crackled inside my bum bag.

“Umm. I…err… I think the logger bird has just returned.”

Hotte did not seem too certain about that. I fiddled with the bum back to get the radio out when a more assertive Hotte proclaimed “It’s our bird! It’s our bird!”

“I’ll be with you shortly!” I replied. “Just don’t let it go anywhere!”

I crammed the laptop back into the backpack and crawled out of the cave in record time and started to boulder hop round the point towards the penguin landing.

“It’s on the move!” Hotte shouted into the radio.

“I’m coming! If I don’t make you go after it!” I wheezed while negotiating the rocks. When I reached the penguin landing area I started to hunch and move carefully from rock to rock. I did not want to send any of the penguins off in a flight.

“She’s almost up at in the creek!”

I peeked around the infamous rock where I had managed to get the logger off the other Tawaki yesterday. No penguins in sight. I climbed further uphill turned left – and there she was. Standing on a rock looking at me as if she wanted to say “Oh great, that guy again.” She certainly expressed her thoughts on me when I picked her up and she started pecking my hands and arm.

Less than five minutes later I released her up at the creek – with another successful GPS logger recovery accomplished! We packed up and headed out shortly after the penguin had made her way up into the Kiekie.

It was a rather weird feeling to get into the car and drive back home to Neil’s Beach in daylight. The past 3 weeks we had always returned long after dark.

But best of all… the i-gotU had recorded more than 2000 GPS fixes in the past four days, representing two and a half foraging tracks. The penguin had performed quite some journeys in search for food, swimming up nearly 40 km away from Jackson Head and covering more than 100km of distance in a bit over 38 hours. This is certainly one of the wider foraging ranges I have observed in chick rearing penguins.

Interesting to see how the foraging ranges apparently change from very short in the two to three weeks after the chicks have hatched (i.e. the chick-guard stage) to rather long when the chicks are old enough to be left alone (post-guard stage). More interestingly still with the tracking data we have now is the observation I made on the rocky shore and in the nesting areas in the past few days.

One of the things I have been doing the past weeks – and never have delved into on this blog – is collecting penguin scat samples for DNA analysis to determine their prey composition. In other words – I have seen lots of shit. And during the chick-guard stage, the penguin poo looked quite different from what it does now. Back then, the stuff was mostly grey, almost silvery and had quite a strong smell to it which I knew from other penguin species. I am fairly certain that oily fish like sprat or anchovy were the penguins’ main diet. In the last week or so, penguin poo has turned to all kinds of shades of green. While my initial reaction was that the poo was from male penguins heading out after a prolonged period of starving while caring for the nest), I have observed female penguins returning form a foraging trip and offloading the green cargo as well. So the green colour is more likely coming from whatever prey they are eating at the moment rather than a result of bile going through an empty system.

So despite all the set-backs in the first weeks – be it from a lack of devices to start with, drowning of i-gotUs or our general inexperience to successfully recover devices on penguins that are able to disappear between rocks without a trace – despite all that we go home with exciting new information on Tawaki!

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!