Penguin Pete's Diary
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4/2/01 - Bechervaise Island
The chick tagging on Beche started on Friday. I have been in at Mawson repairing some equipment that got damaged when an electrical fault in one of the buildings did bad things. I boated out with a team of volunteers to help with the tagging, but the wind started picking up, so the volunteers had to take to the boats or risk getting stuck out here for a long time. Two of us stayed behind, leaving 6 on the island to do tagging. We finished all the birds we need to do today, last one at a about 10 pm. The weather forecast for the next few days is not good, so we decided to soldier on. The tags are tiny electronic transponders that are injected into the fatty layer in the chicks backs. It's very similar to the tags that can be put into pets for identification. They are also used on cattle and sheep. The automatic weighing system can read these tags, so a track can be kept on individual birds during the one season, and over many seasons. This gives information such as arrival/departure weights, arrival time for breading, and foraging trip durations, and in the long run, is a much less invasive data gathering technique than the alternatives.
The chicks are all a bit bigger than this now, and leave their nests to huddle together.
