Weekly greetings from the Antarctic.
Time is flying by here & in a month we'll be leaving along with the majority of the penguins & the seals. Our past week has been full of nasty weather in the mornings (wet snow & strong winds) followed by beautiful afternoons. I even got to lounge on the front deck in a tank top yesterday & Ben was brave enough to jump into the ocean for a quick swim. It's morning now & the wind is howling. Poor little penguin chicks. This weather is hard on them. They all huddle together in a pile to stay warm as they wait for mom or dad to return from sea with food. The adult birds who aren't busy raising chicks have begun their annual molt. They look ragged & miserable as they sit in a sheltered area & wait for their new feathers to grow in. The cape is snowy with old penguin feathers. They're everywhere. Chinstrap chicks are also molting into their adult plumage. Almost all of the birds have "creched" so our daily nest checks are coming to an end & our focus will shift to banding birds & weighing fledglings before they head to sea. We have to band 1200 chicks. It sounds like we recruit the help of all 10 residents of the cape & make a full day of herding & banding the little guys (although by then they will be adult sized.) This week we helped Olivia, the Chilean vet, gather some blood samples from penguins. She's looking for blood born diseases & another researcher is hoping to measure heavy metal contamination in their blood. Our penguin diet sampling continues. We have 3 more days of that. We also did a gentoo chick census - counting all of the surviving chicks. We've been visiting our skua territories to put leg bands on their chicks. I have some excellent video of Mike getting clocked in the head by an angry skua parent. Life in camp has been fairly crowded with 6 of us packed into our tiny hovel. Tomorrow our camp leader, Mike, is leaving for the US. He'll be replaced by the program director, Rennie, who will help us close down the camp. It's hard to believe we only have a month left. I'll be very sad to leave, but fortunately when all of the chicks fledge & the pups wean, the cape will be abandoned & it will feel like an appropriate time for us to migrate north as well. I hope the winter is treating you well. Take care.

Love, Iris & all of the pinguinos