Week 9 (?) Su 26 January 2020, morning at Cape Shirreff
Somehow Friday marked the halfway point in my third season here at Cape Shirreff. Having experienced the glorious full length season of late October to mid-March my first year, these shortened seasons of early December to mid-March are difficult to fathom.
The drastically lower amount of snow at the start breaks my spirit; there’s not enough for skiing to work, and the best sledding runs are already melted out. Plus, we have to hit the ground sprinting because we’re already behind on seabird data collection when we arrive. Needing to get main camp up and running while also needing to open the Skua Shack, count nests, measure eggs, establish monitoring plots, and resight bands makes for a busy first few weeks. Oh, throw in helping the pinniped team with catching Antarctic fur seal pups for their study sample. We don’t exactly relax much.
Then all of the sudden time starts slipping by as we settle into life at the Cape. Laura and I are visiting our penguins daily to see whether they’re sitting on eggs or chicks. Suddenly we’re only a week out from Christmas, and we figure it’s time to put up the Christmas tree and decorations. Christmas morning cinnamon rolls and presents come and go, as does our feast of smoked turkey, smoked salmon, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, rolls, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and eggnog.
As the adults grow more defensive, little fluffy penguin chicks appear. Penguin diet sampling begins in late December and continues on through the present. On New Year’s Eve we stay up late as we swap random stories until 23:59. I stand on a chair and drop a ball as we count down the last 10 seconds of 2019.
Now it’s 2020, “Our Year!” as Laura has decided and likes to announce. The days are positively flying by. Laura has taken to looking at the clock on the Skua Shack wall as she says, “Well, another day gone here at the Cape!” as early as noon. As much as this always makes us laugh, I ban her from making the announcement before 16:00.
Around the first week of January we cry a farewell to Andy and Caitie and welcome Doug to camp. Since the pinniped team is now a man down, Laura and I become pseudo “pinnipeders” as we sub in to help with capturing Antarctic fur seal mothers. With their enlarging bald spots, fur seal puppies begin to look less adorable. We weigh them every 2 weeks to see how much their bellies have grown.
Our checks of brown skua hilltop territories continue every 4 days, helping keep us in shape/make us feel out of shape. Most skua eggs hatch, and soon skua chicks start disappearing (dying). It’s fine by us; adult skuas steal our penguin chicks.
Speaking of which, the penguin chicks have ridiculous bellies; they epitomize the concept of a pear-shaped body. The gentoo chicks are gigantic, floppy-flippered fluffballs who chase adults for food and have made total chaos of the colonies. Créche is nearly complete, meaning adults are now in low numbers in the colonies since they’re mostly out foraging to find food for their hungry chicks. Just at the beginning of créche, squads of 5-6 chinstrap chicks are appearing in some of the colonies. Fortunately chinstraps are better behaved and stay in their colonies rather than running wild like the gentoos.
Yesterday we took our census of gentoo chicks, which was both cute and frustrating. In case it wasn’t clear, gentoos don’t sit still. Despite their efforts to drive us crazy by preventing exact counts, we now know that there are 99 more chicks alive at this point than last year, which is wonderful news!
With only the final round of chinstrap diet sampling ahead of us, Laura and I are now saying, “The season is over!” Because although we’re only at the halfway point in time, our seabird work is rapidly winding down. Other than rounding up gentoo chicks for banding in early February, we’ve finished our studies of their breeding season. Chinstrap work will last a little longer, but we’ll no longer be checking nests once créche is complete. Our lives will switch to a focus on data entry, camp-wide inventory, and baking. Or at least I’ll be baking, but I’ve been doing that most of the time.