These last two days have been very long with a lot of work, so I am
reasonably exhausted, so I am going to keep this short (actually short, I
feel like I usually tell myself these will be short then they suddenly get
all philosophical or something).
Friday was the first day I actually got to hold a penguin. It was pretty
exciting, kind of a life bucket list check mark there. I will say this
about penguins though- they have evolved to live in some of the harshest
environments possible. By losing their ability to fly they can swim and
dive to depths people can only dream of. Their little legs carry them for
miles across ice and snow and up extremely steep hills to get to their
breeding colonies, where they deliver relatively fresh fish to their young.
But man are they dumb. Evolution has sculpted their bodies to fit their
needs, but it definitely skipped a step moulding whats inside those goofy
little heads. As much as I try to ignore it, the fact remains, they are
still just stupid birds (sorry birders, I'm trying, I really am).
Penguins seem to have about 3 driving forces. Eat, collect rocks for the
nest, and sit on eggs. Notice I dont say produce young or reproduce,
because may of them fail at that little step. There are nests where the
eggs have been laid directly on a sharp rock and cracked. Nests where the
parents sitting on the egg in the snow have melted the snow down to where
the bird can barely see out of its little hole and the eggs are starting to
float away under the snow around it. Sometimes they try to steal each
others eggs, but less as a parental instinct and more because they think
it would look good with the rocks they have adorned their divot in the snow
with. Which comes to another interesting/ funny/ kind of sad behavior of
the penguin. Plenty of people have heard oh the male brings a female a
pebble and if she likes it, they bond, and mate, and raise offspring blah
blah blah. Maybe I just watched Good Luck Chuck too many times (mostly for
Jessica Alba, lets be honest). I dont actually know if thats true, but what
I do know is they incessantly collect rocks to make their nests out of. Its
kind of cute, and it gives truer meaning to the term "penguin mines" that
we call the northern tip of Cape Shirreff where all the penguin colonies
are.
That being said, they arent all stoic birds tirelessly collecting rocks to
protect their young and impress their mates. A good number of birds have
figured out, why walk all the way over there and search for just the right
pebble when I can just sit here and wait for my neighbor to not look and
steal his. It happens almost constantly. The work I was helping with was to
weigh male-female pairs and their first egg laid. This involved removing
birds (very temporarily) from their nests. Usually we tried to only remove
one bird at a time and give them a chance to have the mate there to take
over nest guarding duties, aka sitting on a rock stuffed inside a blue
latex glove that we used as a dummy for their white round egg... However,
despite our best efforts, there was inevitably some times where neither
bird was on its nest. Fittingly, we were doing this work on Black Friday,
because it became a mad dash to raid and loot the empty nest. Sometimes
with up to 4 or 5 birds standing around picking the best rocks (including,
at times, the one in the latex glove). At one point, a male we had just
released back to his nest was standing in his own nest, stealing pebbles,
then looking around trying to find his nest. His instinct to steal rocks
temporarily overpowered his instinct to sit on any egg-ish shaped object IN
HIS NEST. Silly birds. Its also pretty entertaining releasing them after
you are done working them up because they are flailing and slapping and
biting (naturally), but if you hold them above their nest and their egg for
about 10 seconds, they eventually see the egg and instinct kicks in and
they just calm down, waddle over, do their little mate head bobbing dance
(occasionally they do this to the egg even without their mate there), and
sit down. And its not like a oh they gave me back my egg, thank goodness,
everything is ok, I'm going to calm down. No. Its a ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK
ooo look an egg. Or at least some pebbles to steal.
Ok enough about penguins (I knew this wouldn't be quick).
In other news, I also held my first fur seal pup today (saturday). They
continue to be some of the cutest animals I have ever seen or worked with.
They have little bug eyes and kind of raccoony faces, with ultra soft fur,
and flippers they still haven't quite learned how to use yet. When you pick
them up, they often just keep waving those flippers around and look like
they are trying to take off out of your arms. The one I held was the
sweetest one of the day. It was only about a day and a half old. I think it
hadn't quite learned how to bite yet, so it kind of just hung out in our
arms. The first pup we caught today (we worked on 4 mom-pup pairs) was a
bit of a devil and did its tiny growl and tried to bite a lot, but after
about 5 minutes it got tired and fell asleep in McKenzie's arms. Could be
worse. Usually during these captures we get help from the penguin
biologists (McKenzie and Tony), who work on the pup as we work on the mom.
We recovered 4 GLS tags (see earlier posts) and 2 time-depth recorders,
which I am excited to see the data from. The plan is to recover another TDR
tomorrow. So far we have gotten 3 TDRS back and only lost one, which is
pretty good numbers considering they were deployed (epoxied onto the seals'
backs) in March.
Now I really am going to end it. Hopefully everyone had a good
Thanksgiving. I'm sorry I couldnt say it to each of you individually. We
are finally getting some nicer weather (it was 1C/~33F today!). The problem
now is the snow is starting to melt so walking around SUCKS. You sink to
your knees in places and just have to keep going. I did have some fun
skiing and am getting to the point where I can kind of turn going down
hills, so thats good. And just to be clear, we use telemark skis so its
harder than you might think!
K now I'm really done.
I need dinner ideas! Send some recipes, or leave them in the comments below
if you can figure out how to do so.
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