Hi all, happy New Year and thanks for your patience in waiting for me to post again - because PENGUINS!
Yes, it's that time of our stay on Marion Island when we field researchers get the chance to follow up on the penguin hatchlings. On this last trek out, my job was to focus on the Macaroni and Rockhopper penguins.
You can probably guess that the Rockhopper got its name from its dance moves on the rocks.
This link is pretty helpful.
These are Rockhopper penguins which are incubating at the moment. They're the ones that bounce around on the rocks, just like their name says.
The Macaroni penguins at a place called the Amphitheatre here on the island where there are thousands of breeding Macaroni penguins. The eggs have started hatching now, a really exciting time for us researchers.
This is a Brown Skua with its young chick, about 1 week old.
Here's an incubating Grey-headed albatross. Their eggs have also started to hatch.
Here are the Sooty albatrosses, which have small chicks now.
This small grey bird with red beak and feet is an antarctic tern. They've started breeding recently on the island. Exciting!
The fur seals also started their breeding season. The young ones are being born now.
Isn't life hard? ;-)
These are molting elephant seals.
And these pics are of me working counting the Macaroni and Rockhopper penguins around the island. Just call me Rockhopper!
On a serious note, the work we're doing with the penguins is important. Because of commercial overfishing and a number of other factors, some estimates put the decline of the Rockhopper population at more than thirty percent over the last thirty years of the last century. We're still trying to figure out the numbers in the 21st century and the work of our team contributes significantly to that all important data.
The work of this team on Marion Island is coming to an end. Pretty soon we'll be back in South Africa and back to "regular life". But the conservation lessons I've learned here will stick with me for a lifetime.
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Photo credits: Paige Potter and Thando Cebekhulu
