Hello Bird Island

Getting into the swing of things:

Arriving on Bird Island was a bit of a shock to the system. For the first three days it was a manic flurry of activity and people as we unloaded the bulk of the year’s supplies (including food and fuel to get us through the summer and following winter), and at the same time I was delving into the seal work, which meant morning and evening visits to the Special Study Beach (SSB) to see the lovely, long-studied community of Antarctic fur seals.

Getting to grips with an old BI tradition: Gin and Tonics on the Jetty.

During the breeding season Bird Island is home to an enormous population of furries. The males arrive first to stake their claim on a patch of land, and in-between the occasional tousles, there seems to be a large amount of napping and waiting around, until one day, the ladies (with their hugely swollen bellies) lumber up the beach and pick out a nice spot to get comfortable in. From then on the males are constantly on alert, charging around, rounding up females as they pass through their patch and chasing off any other males who infringe on the invisible boundaries.

The males on their patches of turf wait eagerly for the females to arrive.

Often the females deliver their pups only a day or two after appearing on the beach, and we arrived just in time to see the first pup born on SSB. During my first morning at work, three puppies were born so along with counting, identifying and mapping the adults, it was straight into the puppy madness.

The first few females on the beach with their pups (the small, black, fluffy things) and big male guard keeping watch.

The pups are great when they are first born and still trying to get used to their ungainly flippers. It must be hard as an aquatic mammal when your first experience of the world is having your face rubbed in a load of gravel. I guess its like a light bulb going off when the pups first venture into the water a few weeks after birth. Suddenly the flappy, cumbersome flippers make sense and moving around is easy (although it still takes a while before anything you could class as swimming occurs. For a long time it just seems to be very enthusiastic splashing).

A young puppy (with a fat belly full of milk) looks a bit embarrassed to be caught in the midst of fighting with her own flippers while her mother sleeps on unaware.