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| Gourdin Island |
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| Adelie penguin |
Today was a really cool day as I visited two sites that I
had never been to before. This morning
Melissa and I landed at Gourdin Island which is home to over 16,000 breeding
pairs of Adélie penguins, ~1,000 pairs of Chinstrap penguins, and ~600 pairs of
Gentoo penguins. This is one of few
sites in the Antarctic where all three species of
Pygoscelis (or brush-tailed) penguins breed sympatrically. Due to the large number of nesting birds
spread across a vast landscape, Melissa and I decided to count the large colony
of Chinstrap penguins close to our landing site. The wind was blowing at about 20 knots and
the few beaches we could land on seemed to be clogged with ice. After cruising around for 10-15 minutes, we
settled on a rocky outcrop where we could scuttle up over the snow bank with
relative ease. I am always grateful to
have Melissa as my partner in situations like this as she has much more field
experience and is an all around logistics queen.
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We had about an hour to complete our work and decided the
best use of our time would be for Melissa to create a GPS tracklog around the
Chinstrap penguin colony while I counted all of the birds inside of the
colony. This type of census helps inform
our colleagues back in the United States who use satellite imagery to count
large penguin colonies. The tracklog
that we created can be overlaid on a satellite image to map the location of a
given species, in this case Chinstrap penguins, among the abutting Adélie
penguin colonies. Counting the number of
nesting pairs in the field helps the researchers double check that what they
counted as nesting birds in the photograph matches what we saw in the
field.
As monitoring penguin populations via satellite imagery is a
rapidly growing technique, it is import to continue the field work. The type of work we did today serves as a
means of “ground truthing” in that someone counting from a photo can learn to
recognize differences among species (after all, they are all little black and
white birds) as well as the difference between nesting birds and those that are
just perhaps taking a mid-day snooze.
While counting from satellite imagery may be more accurate in some ways
as the counter can “check off” nests they already counted (which is not
possible in the field), counting in the field also has its merits in that we
can use behavioral cues to alert us to nests and to determine which birds are “posers”. And yes, “poser” is a scientific term for a
bird pretending to be on a nest and in so messing up your count as
three-quarters of the way through they get up and leave.
In the afternoon we sailed east to visit
Esperanza station, an Argentinian research base in the Antarctic Sound. Established in the early 1900’s Esperanza not
only functions as a scientific research station, but is also a well-studied
community populated by approximately 140 people each year. Individuals and families (including small
children) arrive at Esperanza from all over Argentina volunteering to spend 10 months living and working
together. There are small homes with
satellite TV and internet, a school, church, infirmary, and scientific
labs. While getting a tour of the station
Melissa and I managed to find two of the Argentinian field biologists; with
205,000 nesting pairs of Adélie penguins and 300-500 pairs of Gentoo penguins,
there is certainly plenty of opportunity to for penguin research. The two women we met had arrived about a
month ago and were studying oxidative stress and diet in penguins, while other
researchers were monitoring reproductive success and chick growth in the birds
nesting near the base. With all parties using their best English, Spanish, and
Spanglish we all really enjoyed learning how we run our respective scientific
programs. It is always a treat to meet other
women, especially young women, conducting Antarctic field work given that
Antarctic science has historically been a male-dominated field. These women have taken the passion and
commitment one step further by dedicating 10 months out of the next year to
complete their research project. Girl
power!
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| Esperanza Station, Hope Bay |
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| Oceanites and penguin biologists from Esperanza Station |
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