Hello there

I created this blog before I left Ireland, back in early November. This is my first entry. Better late than never. I guess a quick introduction is in order. Hi, my name’s Cian Luck. I work for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), as a Zoological Field Assistant on Bird Island. I’ve been living here on Bird Island since November 2013 and I’ll continue to do so until around March 2015. My main role is to maintain the long term monitoring of the resident Antarctic Fur Seal population and the visiting Leopard Seals who show up in winter. I’m continuing work which started in the eighties.

A quick introduction to the island I’m lucky enough to call home. Bird Island is a small island off the western tip of South Georgia, in the Southern Ocean. It measures just under 5 kilometres long and 800m wide at its narrowest point. While its latitude puts it at 54°South we have the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) to thank for bringing the Antarctic weather to our doorstep. There are a couple things that make Bird Island such a unique and interesting dot in the Southern Ocean.

A view of Bird Island taken from the top to Tonc, looking back towards La Roche, and South Georgia in the distance (photo by Jerry Gillham)

1. Bird Island is rat free. South Georgia has long had a huge rat infestation problem (since the old whalers brought them ashore). The rats decimated any ground nesting birds they came across, which was a lot. Bird Island is a rat free haven, home to a wide range of bird species, none quite as charismatic as the enormous and elegant Wandering Albatross. Roughly 10% of the world’s wanderers call Bird Island home.
2. Much of the wildlife (seals and penguins) on Bird Island is dependent on krill. While the waters around BI have a multitude of krill, none of it breeds here, but instead breeds down near the Antarctic continent, and is then swept up to us by the ACC.

In summer we can hold up to 10-12 on base and in winter we fall down to 4 people. Our nearest human neighbours are the folks at the BAS base at King Edward Point (KEP) over on South Georgia (about 8 hours away by ship), and after that the nearest humans are 1,000km away in the Falkland Islands. Instead we’re surrounded by hundreds and thousands of seals, penguins, and birds of all sorts. Our base sits on Freshwater Beach. During the fur seal breeding season we get surrounded on all sides by BIG rowdy males, females calling for their pups, and puppies shouting back. Sleep can be hard to come by at first.

During the summer, pretty much all of my time is taken up with the fur seals, with December being a particularly busy month. We have a Special Study Beach (SSB, sorry about all the acronyms, you’ll catch on quick) that’s an enclosed section of beach with a raised gantry that allows me to access the seals without losing an arm or leg. Throughout the breeding season I visit this beach twice a day, every day. Among many other things, I map out which males are holding territories where on the beach, how many females are on the beach each day, and each pup born on the beach gets weighed, sexed, and is given an individual PIT tag (similar to the microchip you might put in your dog). We also give the pups flipper tags once they’re a bit more grown up, in the hope that we can identify the ones that survive long enough to come back and breed on SSB in later years.

A snow covered Special Study Beach on Christmas Eve, and a male fur seal stubbornly defending his territory against the tide on SSB (photos by Cian Luck)

Fur seals make brilliant mums, but they’re just not big enough to stay with the pups the whole time from birth to weaning. They have to go to regularly go to sea to feed and return with fresh milk to feed the pup. Each year we monitor how long the mothers leave the pups unattended by fitting a number of mums with radio transmitter tags (we call them Txs) that tell us when she’s ashore and she’s at sea.

Puppies play while the mums are away (photo by Cian Luck)

On top of this, we constantly monitor the fur seal diets by collecting fresh scats each week and sifting through the contents. Not only is this a glamorous job but it’s hugely insightful. By looking at the mean size of the krill in the scats we can keep tabs on the health of the krill stock the seals are feeding on.

There’s plenty more fur seal work that keeps me out of trouble for the summer but those are the big three jobs. In winter, my focus changes from fur seals to leopard seals, which only arrive around May. My main job then is to do the daily leopard seal round where I walk the same route along the beaches and photograph any leopard seals I meet. This allows us to build a comprehensive photo-ID database, which we can then use to identify any returning leopard seals and new faces. I haven’t met a lep yet but if I meet any new leopard seals this year, then I could well be the first human they’ve ever seen.

Oops... Summer's over

Well it’s now winter. I never did get round to starting this blog in summer, but while the fur seals were keeping me busy I was thankful to have enough time to sleep, and blog writing fell down my list of priorities a bit. Sorry that there are no entries here from summer, but maybe a brief synopsis of how it went will do.

I arrived in mid November, as the furry breeding season was just kick starting. Within a week the first pup had born at SSB and Hannah and I (the other half of the seal team; my predecessor, teacher, and good friend) got busier in a hurry after that. Before that happened, I managed to get out and see a bit of the island before the seals kept me glued to the beaches. The first time I walked around the island I swore profusely. It’s hard to believe how majestic and beautiful this island really is until you see it and my pictures can’t do it justice. One of the most jaw dropping sites I saw that week was Big Mac; the world’s second largest Macaroni penguin colony (home to 80,000 or so squaking penguins).

My first trip to Big Mac. The noise and smell are just as impressive as the sight of 80,000 Macaronis (photos by Jerry Gillham and Cian Luck)

As the season tends to pick up in a hurry after first call, there’s a pretty steep learning curve for the incoming seal assistant. It was hard to keep up, but thankfully Hannah was a patient teacher, and in no time we were working at full speed, getting through our SSB rounds in the mornings and evenings, and catching females for Tx deployments in between. By the time my birthday came round we were both feeling weary and ready to unwind. Jess and Steph made me the most amazing seal-shaped birthday cake, and Rob fired up the hot-tub which was just what we all needed (even if it was a little cramped with 7 of us squeezed in).

My seal birthday cake, complete with flipper tags, that Jess and Steph made for me (photo by Cian Luck)

Three days later it was Christmas. It was my first Christmas away from home and it was definitely a first in many ways. It was also one of my favourites Christmases. Hannah and I still had our SSB rounds to do but we tried to take the rest of the day off with everyone else. We then opened presents, exchanged handmade cards, had an absolute banquet for dinner, and played twister until the early hours.

New Year’s was another memorable one. We had a fancy dress party with Bird Island themed cocktails and then at midnight we dashed through the seals to set off flares from the end of the jetty. We had cracking weather the next day so myself, Hannah, Adam, Jess, and Steph decided to shake off the New Years eve headaches by climbing La Roche (the highest peak on BI). The view from the top (356m above the crashing waves) was spectacular. From our picnic spot we spotted a Southern Right Whale feeding off the north cliffs, as well as two enormous (at least the size of BI) ice bergs on the horizon.

New Years Eve fancy dress party and New Years Day hike to the top of La Roche (photos by Jess Walkup and Stephanie Winnard)

It seemed like every other week we had a fancy dress party, or some other event. Once some reinforcements had arrived on base (tradesmen to build a bulk fuel system for the base) we challenged the BAS base at Signy Island to a darts match. To get Skype to work over our internet connection we had to shut down every other phone and computer on base. Once we made contact we played three games of 501 with a crate of beer going to the winners. We won 2 games to 1 and Signy graciously delivered on their promise at last call.

We don’t get many visitors here at BI. Because of the wildlife risk of introducing rats, the South Georgia Government are very strict in controlling who can and can’t land on BI. That’s we everyone was all the more excited to host the BBC for a week in February. Steve Backshall and crew came to film a whole episode of Deadly Pole to Pole here on BI. They wanted to film fur seals, Giant Petrels, Skuas, Prions, and wanderers. Hannah and I showed them round on their first day and tried to find them as big and impressive a male as we could muster (easier said than done as most the big males had left by mid January). We managed to find them a couple decent males on Evermann Cove and they got some good footage. They filmed loads of cool stuff, including some cracking shots of some of the bigger birds scavenging on a seal carcass, but I won’t give too much away. The Bird Island episode should be out on CBBC in the summer (northern hemisphere) and out on BBC 1 sometime in September. Once the guys had finished filming we fired up the BBQ and had them all round for dinner before they set off to shoot the next episode on South Georgia.

Steve Backshall and me at our post-filming BBQ. Nice chap (photo by Cian Luck)

Time moves strangely on BI and it seemed not long after the BBC had left that we were getting ready for Hannah, Steph, and this year’s summer crew to leave. The run up to last call was a mad flurry of packing boxes, writing bills of lading, sorting import and export permits, and before we knew it, saying our goodbyes. Hannah and Steph handed over the seal and albatross jobs to me and Jess respectively. I don’t think either of us could have asked for better teachers and partners in crime. Between the girls and the terrific summer crew, who were the best support and most fun we could ask for, it was sad to see such a great group leave. After we’d waved off the ship, Jerry, Jess, Rob, and I walked back to the suddenly spacious base and began settling in for winter. Sure what could go wrong?