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The boys are back in town!

Hello!

I was walking to lab the other day and a bird flew by. Since I wasn't thinking too clearly, it didn't register at first, but then I stopped dead. A bird flew by!!?? Of course, what I saw was a South Polar Skua .The boys are back in town!

Skuas are a type of seagull and are very resourceful birds. Jerry says that there are only 16,000 breeding pairs down here. They have a bad reputation for being aggressive and going after Adélie penguin chicks, but they are opportunistic feeders and devoted parents. Their bad reputation is unjustified. To me it is amazing that they can survive down here at all. After all, even though one of their food sources is cute and fuzzy, predators serve a type of housekeeping function by removing the dead and dying

They are clever birds and have learned that people can be a source of food, too. I remember when I was here last, we put our frozen foods outside of the research huts in a cardboard box. We assumed that if we covered the boxes with snow that they would be safe from Skua assault. We were wrong. I came out one day to see a pair of them happily tearing apart our carefully concealed boxes and dining quite grandly on our frozen steaks and frozen prawns.

There are two species of Skuas that breed in the Southern Ocean: the South Polar Skua (Catharacta maccormicki), which breeds on the Antarctic Continent, and the Brown Skua (Catharacta lonnbergi), which breeds further north on the subantarctic islands. The South Polar Skua is the smaller of the two species. The South Polar Skuas arrive at their breeding colonies in late October to mid-December and hatch their young in late December to late January after an incubation period of 24-34 days. As I mentioned, these South Polar Skuas are believed to prey heavily on eggs and young of Adélie penguins near the coast. Jerry believes this is incorrect and that they rely mostly on fish for food. In any case, both species migrate northward after the breeding season and are winter visitors to Australia, although the South Polar Skua has been recorded as far north as Greenland and the Aleutian Islands. What an amazing range these birds have!

Other people are back in McMurdo, too. Jerry Kooyman and Greg Marshall came in yesterday to join our group. Jerry is in charge of his own project, which is to do a census of the Emperor Penguins at various colonies about McMurdo. He will also help Paul with some of the experiments. Greg is from the National Geographic Society and brings with him the Crittercam. This instrument combines an underwater camera with data-collection capability. The penguins will be fitted with this camera and will, in effect, shoot their own movies. Last year, they found that the penguins were feeding upon the borq, a small fish that resides on the underside of the frozen sea ice.

Paul is very glad to have them here. He could have used their help earlier this week when the sea ice camp was hammered by a very bad storm. We had wind gusts out there in excess of 70 MPH. Even in town, we went to Condition 2. Unfortunately, two of us were in McMurdo when the storm struck and we couldn't leave town since it was Condition 1 out on the sea ice. That left Paul and Dave to deal with this two day storm by themselves. The poor guys were exhausted since the camp was inundated with snow drifts and the sleep tents were flattened, much to Dave's dismay. At one point, there was so much snow that it looked as if the penguins would be able to escape the corral. In the middle of this snowstorm, the Dave and Paul had to build a new emergency corral and then moved the birds into it before the old corral disappeared. Ultimately, the old corral was buried under seven or eight foot drifts.

Fortunately, the weather has since cleared and the large, snow-removal vehicles have been able to go out to the camp to clean things up. Everything is pretty much back to normal. Our experiments are back on track again.

Well, that's the news from McMurdo. I hope that things are fine where you are.

Kathi

"Guess who just got back today?

Them wild-eyed boys that'd been away

Haven't changed, had much to say

But man, I still think them cats are crazy

...Spread the word around

Guess who's back in town?"

- Thin Lizzy