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October 6, 2014October 6, 2014
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Storm

We woke up to blue skies and sunshine. A welcome change to yesterday’s downpour. However, it blows a howling south-westerly which throws enormous seas at Neil’s Beach – and no doubt at Jackson Head. With high tide being smack-bang in the middle of the morning, there’s nothing for us to do until later in the...

October 5, 2014October 5, 2014
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Boxed in

I hate it when the weather forecast is right about heavy rain. But they hit the nail on the head when they predicted 200-250mm for the West Coast on the news yesterday. It does not rain, it pours. Rain lashes the windows and drums on the roof of our Neil’s Beach retreat. It does not...

October 4, 2014October 4, 2014
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Logger deployments #5 and #6

A beautiful bit ice-cold day on the West Coast today. In a way the weather was a perfect match for our final attempt to recover our logger bird. We went in this morning to check the two track cameras observing the penguin landing and the logger nest. As on the previous days the nest was...

October 3, 2014October 3, 2014
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How’s that for a story twist?

The logger bird fooled us. Or perhaps its mate fooled us. I guess both of them fooled us good. We headed out to the Head after breakfast to finish the camera run we’d started yesterday. One of the sites we changed SD cards was out at Popi’s Plaza, where image data hopefully gives us new...

October 1, 2014October 1, 2014
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Nothing new on the Western Front

Yes, the weather is packing in. It started with clouds slowly creeping up on us from the South. And towards the end of our camera run taking us to all our Jackson Head West sites drizzle set in. We got the SD cards from most our cameras and removed the Bushnell from JH07 which had...

September 30, 2014September 30, 2014
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Bugger!

We spent another evening hidden between the rocks below our logger bird’s colony. Today was supposed to be the last day of good weather before a southerly front hits the South Island bringing with it cold, wet weather. So better make the most of it and get our logger back. Well, first thing we noticed...

September 29, 2014September 29, 2014
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Hope dies last

We’re stuck in idle mode with not much to do other than trying to get back the only device we still have. The weather on the West Coast is spectacular which makes being stuck in town even more of a drag. It’s one of these days where you can spent hours on end thinking about...

September 28, 2014September 28, 2014
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M.I.A.

We went in this morning to check the i-gotU logger’s nest but just like last night only found her mate and chick in the burrow. A quick look at the time lapse camera revealed that she had not returned during the night either. Where is she? After spending most of the day cleaning the house...

September 27, 2014September 27, 2014
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Not the birds you’re looking for

A lovely evening to sit between the rocks just underneath our logger bird’s colony waiting for it to return. Today was the second day the penguin had been out with its i-gotU backpack. And it is time to relieve it for its load. We got to the site in the late afternoon and decided to...

September 26, 2014September 26, 2014
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Blasted cameras

Well, that was a bit pointless. We went in today to do the camera round. The idea was to replace batteries where needed and change SD cards so that we could retrieve recorded footage and time lapse images from all 17 cameras out operating at the moment. Good idea in theory. But not so good...