Springtime at Macca and the wildlife on the beaches is stunning. There is also a track upgrade and two birthdays!

Springtime at Macca

Spring is definitely in the air at Macca. We are experiencing warmer days around six to seven degrees Celsius, and a little more blue sky and less wind. Monday morning this week was a stunner and got the photographers out to catch beautiful views of the plateau from station.

The wildlife populations on the beaches are exploding. The elephant seal harems are increasing in size exponentially before our eyes with plentiful pups arriving. The total number of breeding animals on the beaches on both sides of the isthmus alone is now up around a thousand. Meg and Evelyn are assisting the rangers by doing weekly counts of the isthmus beaches, and later this month many of us will be involved in an all-island census count. The pups are weaned at around a month of age, and so the first pups born in the first week of this month will be little rolling fat weaners soon.

The king penguins which weren’t already rearing a chick through the winter have returned to moult and commence breeding very soon for this year. The first of the royal penguins, which all spend the winter out to sea, have returned to their huge colony areas at Sandy Bay and The Nuggets, to commence breeding. The gentoo penguins are already nesting and on eggs — they will have chicks in a few weeks now. We are awaiting the rockhopper penguins and sooty albatross, which won’t be long. An interesting avian inhabitant of the island is the self introduced redpoll finch, and these are now nesting in the tussocks. These little finches were deliberately introduced from Europe to New Zealand and then blown by storms across to Macca. They are very shy and notoriously difficult to photograph.

Other happenings on station

Our fantastic chef Benny is having a well deserved break from station duties this week and seeing the other end of the island, assisting supervising comms tech Scotty with a work program involving the VHF repeater stations and field hut radios down island. So the rostered daily slushy (kitchen assistant) has been the daily cook and we are continually impressed with the hidden culinary talents of other expeditioners! In particular, both Dr Meg and Bureau of Meteorology senior observer Keon celebrated birthdays in the last week, and cooked each other’s birthday cakes.

TASPAWS rangers Chris and Mike have been working for some time, during their time spent on station, and with some assistance from others on station, on a major upgrade of the near-station section of the overland walking track, at the top of doctor’s track. They have constructed a very impressive section of built up boardwalk track — about 500 meters long — where the old track was very mushy or badly eroded and scoured out. This is now being appreciated on a daily basis by the keen walkers who get out most days to do the Gadgets Gully/Doctors track exercise walk.

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