Author: Site admin (Thomas Mattern)

Return to Haast for more tawaki fliming with the Japanese crew.

A day with little about penguins and a lot of house cleaning followed by a long drive back to Dunedin.

In which we're getting our last logger bird back and conclude this year's field work.

We finally figure out how to outwit the penguins (and not vice versa) and get a logger back.

Let me spell it out. This was the most frustrating day of all! A logger bird returned, unfortunately in too many ways. Because first it returned to Jackson Head, but then it spotted me – or rather my head poking out from behind a rock – and then it decided to return to the ocean....

Nothing happened, just like yesterday. Another day out on the rocks, waiting and looking for any sign of logger birds. We have now shifted our focus on the creek beach access where we expect our last two logger birds to return at some stage. I am starting to give up hope that we will see...

We got out just after 3am this morning. Yes, it was a beautiful moonlit night. But it was also bloody cold out on the rock we were marooned on until the tide finally allowed us to head out to the car. I was zombified after 10 hours out on the rocks without anything to eat...

The last week of this season’s field work is upon us. And we decided to deploy two more i-gotUs. Best time would be sometime in the middle of the night when presumably the majority of birds had returned to their nests, most of which are deserted during the day. That way we could combine waiting...

I took a day off. My shoulder and my knee seem to have suffered from the logger bird recovery yesterday. So today I took it slow and sent out Hotte and Ursula to sit and wait for our remaining logger bird. At 6pm a particularly nasty rain set in and I started to feel really...

I decided to expand our observation period. Hotte manned the lookout below Hilltop at 4pm. Plan was to relieve him sometime between 7 and 8pm, before Ursula would join me later. While the weather had looked far better than what last night’s forecast told us (“hurricane force winds and heavy rain”), it started to get...