Ardery Blizzards

(Januari 1999)
Orcas and satellite tracking
(by Anna Beinssen)

January has been a really exciting month on Ardery Island. The chicks are hatching, we have regular visits from Minkes and Orcas and the weather has been, mostly, wonderful. Ardery Island, aka 'The Rock', is a small, high (~1km x 600m x 100m) island about 10km south of Casey. It's home to thousands of Antarctic Petrels, Cape Petrels, Snow Petrels (large and small morphs), Wilson's Storm Petrels and Southern Fulmars. For the last three summers it's also been home to Dutch biologist Jeroen Creuwels and his helpers. This season the 'Arderian' crew is Jeroen, Dutch technical assistant Waldo Ruiterman and Australian field assistant Anna Beinssen.

Home on Ardery is two apple huts and from here we carry out research on the breeding biology of the Antarctic Petrels and Southern Fulmars for Jeroen's PhD thesis. We also monitor a few colonies of Snow Petrels and Cape Petrels, as well as recording the skua's breeding success.

The 'Skua walks' are great fun. We check the nests and note the growth of the chicks, which are getting quite big now and running around. Checking a Skua nest is basically, trying to spot a cricket ball sized bit of fawn fluff on chicken legs scooting from rock to rock while preventing the proud parents from removing any of my eyes, ears or anything else unfortunate enough to be poking out! We've got 6 nests on Ardery this year.

Most of our time is spent at two colonies, one of Antarctic Petrels and the other of Southern Fulmars. Both these colonies have a number of birds breeding on artificial nests. These nests continuously record the weight and identity the bird present. The identity is recorded by means of a microchip implanted in the leg of every bird in the study areas.

We also manually check each nest site daily, not all birds in the study area are on artificial nests, and record which parent is on the nest as well as the progress of the egg, most of which are now chicks. Petrel chicks are absolutely gorgeous little balls of fluff with tiny beaks and feet. They manage to remain cute even when they're spraying me in orange spit that smells like rancid fish, I don't think many creatures could pull that off!

A really exciting project that we've just started is satellite tracking. We tape tiny trackers to the feathers between the wings the birds back. We got the first data back from the first three birds yesterday (26/01/99). One of the Antarctic Petrels flew 300km to the north in one day. Jeroen plans to put more trackers on the Antarctics and also the Fulmars. We're all really looking forward to discovering where the birds go.

We've had a few visitors from Casey out to help us this month. Both Jonny Stark and Richard Evans managed to find Snow Petrel chicks where there had been no eggs! An amazing scientific discovery or a slightly incompetent field assistant??...hmmm how embarassing.

Richard recieved an 'Ardery Baptism' from one of the Snowie chicks (one that came from an egg), no visit to Ardery is complete without being spat on by a bird of some description. I think Jonny managed to avoid his 'initiation', he works with the Snowies in at Casey so he's very good at ducking at the right time! There's always lots to do out here and it's great getting helpers from Casey.

It's not all work though. We often take time out to watch the whales cruising around the coast. The Minkes are always around. There has been a massive amount of plankton around Ardery, it makes the water quite murky but the Minkes love it and have been stuffing themselves for the last few weeks. Sometimes they gather in big groups to feed and blow and thrash about in the water, it's spectacular.

We also see the Orcas most days. There are a number of calves in the pod, they are so playful, it's great watching them frollicking around their more sedate parents.

Well that's about it from Ardery. It's another beautiful, windstill day out here and I can see a couple of Minkes cruising about amongst the ice floes. I think it must be time to go and check the Fulmars.

Blizzard #11

Supplement