Hello again from the Antarctic! Another busy week at Cape Shirreff. We had a spell of nasty weather - high winds, rain and snow, but the past few days have been beautiful, making it much easier to work. We finished our annual chinstrap penguin nest census, although we had to break it into two days when the weather didn't cooperate. We have a total of 6600 nesting pairs of chinstraps which is down 8% from last yr. There were hundreds of additional birds which attempted to nest early on, but lost their eggs. Almost every day we see new nest failures. I think this will be a rough yr for the birds. Our gentoo penguin population is down over 13% this year. All four of us took a hike off the cape on Monday to a place called Punta Oeste approximately 6 km south. We were able to skirt past the glacier at low tide to get out there to check on a skua pair and look for gull nests. The skuas were there, but hadn't laid eggs yet. We did find 15 new gull nests which was interesting to see. The first penguin chicks of the year started hatching last week on Nov 30. There are quite a few gentoo penguins with chicks now. They are really cute for their first week or two - tiny and helpless, but voracious eaters. Within two weeks they become potbellied - all belly with a little head and little feet. They can barely walk. Chinstrap chicks won't be hatching until mid to late December. We have gotten most of the early season bird work done, now our days consist of daily nest checks and helping the seal biologists in the afternoons. They are in the process of capturing females and their 1-2 day old pups to mark and outfit with radio transmitters. The whole process takes about 30 minutes. Mike lures the female out of her group by pulling her pup away, then John's job is to catch her in the net like a dogcatcher. Our job is to fend off all of the aggressive peripheral bulls who come in looking for a distraction to start a fight and get some females on their territories. The worst ones are the bulls who don't have any females. They get pretty excited when they see a female chasing after her pup. The captures all went really smoothly. There are now 5 females with transmitters and their pups have cute new hairdos - bleached letters L, Y, O, N, S ...we think John is trying to spell his name on pups. During the slow time until Christmas we will enter data, paint our building, and prepare for the busy days in January when we will be putting in long hours weighing chicks, doing diet samples, and putting transmitters on birds. In camp, we managed to find the BBC world service on our single side band radio. The reception isn't the greatest, but it is interesting to get a little world news now and then. You have to be careful not to turn it on while they are reporting cricket scores. Our Chilean neighbors are fully moved in & have dealt with their over winter damage (the door to their hut blew off & their living quarters were filled with snow when we arrived. We moved out all the snow, but it was still a disaster when they arrived.) They now join us for dinner every Saturday. The rest of the time they are busy working on fur seals. Things have been pretty quiet in this part of the world. I hope all is well up north. Take care.

Love and penguin feathers,  Iris