Hi!
All's well down here at Cape Shirreff. I had an excellent birthday. It wasn't as beautiful as last year. In fact it was kind of drizzly all day. We counted gentoo penguin chicks in the morning, then banded some skua chicks in the afternoon. In the evening after an excellent Thai dinner, the Chileans came over & we had a party. Dana & John made the most impressive birthday cake I've ever had; a life-size replica of a chinstrap penguin. I almost didn't have the heart to cut & serve it, but cake was meant to be eaten. The weather has been calm & pleasant for the past week, so it has been smooth sailing for our group out doing a survey of the fur seal population of the South Shetland Islands. In fact, they ended up finishing a couple of days early & the ship returned here on 5 Feb. They keep surprising us. This was our final chance to send out mail, so everyone was frantically writing in order to be ready for their 8am arrival. We now have two new camp members; my boss Wayne & his boss, Rennie. It's been great to have Wayne here because he makes the penguin work go so much faster. We got through our last session of diet sampling in less than 3 hrs. It normally takes us 6. It's also been great to have a 3rd person to do some of the census work & banding. Tomorrow we're planning the big chinnie chick round-up. This year we're only banding 500 chinstrap chicks. It's an all island event - all 9 of us head out with a long net, our pockets full of flipper bands, banding pliers at the ready. We corral a group of 20-40 chicks into the net. They are very easy to herd. The biggest challenge we have is the chicks always run to the deepest, muddiest cesspool they can find & we end up handling hundreds of filthy, wet, guano-covered chicks. As much as I love chinstraps, this is definitely not one of their more endearing moments. It only takes a few hours to get all the bands on, but everyone is usually covered with mud by the end & showers are mandatory even given our water limitations. Our daily seabird work these days is mostly just doing band resights & measuring skua chicks. The penguin molt is in full swing right now with large groups of birds huddled out of the wind and feathers flying everywhere. They are very skittish & hard to work around. In the evenings I go out & wander the beaches looking at thousands of left flippers in search of bands. Meanwhile the chicks are growing fast & fat! Some of the chinstrap chicks I've seen right after they've been fed have enormous bellies. It's pretty comical. The parents are bringing back krill loads of over 1 kg which is very impressive considering they only weigh 4 kg. For the next 2 weeks, their full time job is to be cargo carriers & feed the voracious chicks. While it has been a rough year for the penguins, most nests will successfully fledge one chick. Last night, three of our Chilean colleagues left. The two geologists finally got picked up, but so did Romeo who had an infected bite on his finger from working with fur seal pups. He wasn't able to keep it clean & the finger got very swollen. Antibiotics weren't helping, so the Navy came to rescue him & he's now on the way to the hospital at Frei base on King George Island. It's sad to see our friends go. Not much else is happening down here. Our season is really winding down as people search for projects to keep them busy. Wayne will probably let me leave a couple of weeks early with the Chilean ship, since the US AMLR camp won't be closing until Mar 13, weeks after the last penguins fledge. I wasn't really looking forward to a boring month after a fun, busy season with the birds. When the birds leave Cape Shirreff, it really feels like it is time to go. I hope your winter is ending well. Enjoy.

Love, Iris