Hello again!
Things are going great down here at Cape Shirreff. Dana & I just finished banding most of the skua chicks - a fun job that involves lots of hiking to the high & inhospitable bluffs which skuas choose as their homes. We also got to take a long hike off the Cape to Punta Oueste across the forbidden glacier. It's very safe walking, but we got reprimanded by the higher-ups nonetheless. The US Gov't is a little overcautious with its employees. Yesterday was our most beautiful day of the season - sunny & calm in the morning; warm enough to sit on the deck in shorts & a t-shirt (for a few minutes, anyway.) I enjoyed a leisurely morning writing letters in the sun & watching lazy fur seals & the distant mountains on Livingston Island which have only made occasional appearances this year. The skies were calm enough that a Chilean helicopter from nearby Frei base was finally able to land and deliver the geologists' tools (there are two Chilean geologists looking for plant fossils on the cape.) We were hoping to send out some letters with the helicopter, but by the time our mail made it to the top of El Condor (the landing site 300 ft above our camp), the helicopter had already dumped the supplies & left. Bummer. Now we have to wait until Feb. to send mail. Sorry. Our new arrivals have slid right into the routine. While six people makes camp a bit crowded, it is nice to only cook once a week. Rennie has also been fattening us up with his 6 qt. batches of homemade ice cream. Consequently I've taken up running on the beach when the weather permits. There's a good 1 km stretch to the glacier, so I have to run laps to get enough distance in. We have a lot of penguin work for two more weeks, then it tapers off & all that is left is data entry. Diet sampling is going well, although we end up sorting krill & fish chunks until 9pm and are often late for dinner. We've retrieved and redeployed all 8 of our time-depth recorders. It's great that none of the instrumented birds have been killed by predators. It's always hard to tell & we then spend hours searching the beaches for it looking at thousands of penguin backs. Most of the gentoo chicks have now creched & are waiting patiently for mom & dad to come home with food. I'm writing out at the bird blind (a small cabin nestled amongst the penguin colonies) so I can watch feeding chases, penguins fights, & other antics from a comfortably heated building, with a cup of tea & good music. Rough life. I do still have to go out & do my rounds which takes about 2 hrs - checking nests & looking for banded birds. I only have 2 more chick weights today & then I'm done handling grubby chicks until chick banding day. Soon all of the chinstraps will creche too and our reproductive study will end. It's kind of sad to stop after you have visited these nests every day for 3 months. That's about all the news from here...not much, as usual, but we are a bit isolated. I hope all is well up north. Enjoy your week.

Love, Iris