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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
