Another week at Cape Shirreff.
Christmas is almost here & our little x-mass
tree is overflowing with gifts. Penguin chicks are hatching left & right.
They are adorable little fluff balls & they grow incredibly fast. The 1 wk
olds are already bulging out from under their parents. Now the skuas will
start teaming up & harassing the penguins to steal chicks for dinner.
Very sad. Life's tough as a penguin. Yesterday was windy & wet, so we devoted
the morning to our most tedious task - putting colored tape on 1200
penguin bands that we'll put on chicks in Feb. Each year 1000+ chicks get
color banded when they fledge & each year we look for bands to see who's
still alive. The nice thing about this tedious task is we can watch movies
& stay out of the rain while we do it. We even suckered the seal biologists
into helping us because they wanted to watch the movie. Last night we saw
our first humpback whales out in the bay in front of our house. The
Chileans came over in the evening to celebrate the "summer" solstice with
us. Yesterday was the longest day of the year, although it has been light
24 hrs for the past month. We helped our Chilean friends catch & weigh
100 fur seal pups this week. I was one of the seal catchers - going out to
gather pups, checking their sex, & putting them in a bucket to be weighed.
With 7 of us, the process only took 2 hrs, then we all had a big dinner at
our place. We'll do pup weights every 2 wks, with the pups getting smarter &
heavier each time, so our job gets harder. Bull fur seals are starting to
look emaciated after fasting for almost 2 months, all in the name of defending their
territory on the off chance they'll get a female to mate with. Females are
mostly low on the beaches, but bulls have territories everywhere, even on
the highest hills. Only a small % will get to mate, but they all
wait patiently & fight viciously to keep their turf. Females are taking
trips of 1-4 days to feed, then they come back to shore & call out to
their pups in the pup playpen. Pups are growing fast & exploring everywhere.
Soon we'll have pups on our front porch. The Chileans named a pup after me -
she is one of the new twins and of course is very cute. Our snow is melting fast,
so we probably won't have a white x-mass. I wish all of you a snowy, beautiful holiday.
Take care.
Love,
Iris
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