Wildlife monitoring has gone well at Macquarie Island this week. We completed the fur seal pup counts, carried out drone flights over king penguin colonies, continued the wandering albatross monitoring and began the northern giant petrel chick census.
The fur seal pups are growing up fast, now looking less like teddy bears and more like real seals. The drone photos show that there are a fair few king penguins on the island, now incubating eggs or young chicks. We have seven wandering albatross currently sitting on eggs across the island, which are being monitored remotely using trail cameras.
The giant petrel census took the wildlife team to the west coast of the island, tussock-hopping over gross elephant seal wallows and climbing between rock stacks searching for chicks. This survey will be completed over the next few days, before moving onto rockhopper penguin surveys!
