It was pouring down when Dave and I stepped out of the hut in full wet weather gear at around 10 am. As there weren’t any pressing matters at hand today, we started out by having a quick look at the boat harbour. Only to be surprised by what we found there.

The animal snoring on the rocks on the other side of boat harbour goes by the Latin name of Hydrurga leptonyx, was about four meters long, had a sleek, snake-like appearance and had short, light gray fur with dark blotches. And if it wouldn’t have been snoring away quite happily it probably would have flashed it’s massive ivories at the sea lion bull nearby. The latter obviously impressed by the presence of such a large leopard seal.

It’s the first leopard seal I have seen in the wild. The first thing I noticed was that even though there was one of the fiercest predators of the Southern Ocean, it looked peculiarly harmless out there on the rocks. Reason for this was that unlike the sea lion, the leopard seal as member of the family Phocidae can not turn their hind flippers downward to use them like feet when on land. As a result, the leopard seal over there seemed more like a fish out of water, rather than a danger to anything that moves in its vicinity. Nevertheless, it seemed that the sea lion nearby was eyeballing the seal as if he expected it to lurch forward any second to take a bite out of his bum. A relaxed sea lion definitely looks different.

In the water of the harbour a bunch of young sea lions were playing tag. Watching them was quite interesting too. In my opinion playing tag can be sheer fun, but the version the those guys did down were playing was closer to “lethal”. It seemed the aim of the game was to push the others under water for as long as possible. The actions of the animals were playful but had a pretty violent look. Every now and then the sea lions would end up in the shallow water and start to snap at each other - again in a playful way, but if they would try that on Dave or me, we would face rather severe consequences.

Interestingly, one of the sea lions featured a branding, the unmistakable sign that it had come up from the Auckland Islands. The Department of Conservation trialled branding as an alternative marking method of sea lions. The sea lions population down there is closely monitored by DOC, and the standard method of marking individuals are flipper tags that are attached to the base of the front flippers by piercing the skin and fixing a plastic tag through the hole. The disadvantage of this method is that the tags are prone to fall off and pretty hard hard to read. Looking at the (unbranded) guys here in the harbour that surprises me not. So DOC trialled hot iron branding, pretty much as it was (and probably still is) being used on horses. Only bigger. However, branding was cancelled soon after it started as it potentially had negative effects for the welfare of the animals. This guy here seemed quite healthy and happy.

After a good half hour in boat harbour, Dave and I bade farewell to Leopard seal and sea lions and hiked up to the colony for our daily nest checks. Up a the colony, there was still no sign that the Exodus of the male penguins will happen anytime soon. They are all sitting up in the colony, head hunched between their shoulders, obviously trying to ignore the pouring rain. Exactly this rain cut Dave’s and my stay up at our observation sites rather short. It’s just no fun sitting in rain that makes you feel as if you’re sitting under the shower - in full wet weather gear.

So we spent most of the day in or around the hut. I kept myself busy with producing nest check spreadsheets on my laptop, and enhancing the data entry interface on my PDA. Dave fiddled with minor repairs or tried to get our only Lotek logger to work. For whatever reason the logger records only gibberish data that doesn’t make sense at all. So it seems that we are one device down before we have deployed anything on the penguins. Bit I must say I’m not too fazed about that as the Lotek logger was only a bonus that my boss shook out of his sleeve shortly before we left for the Snares. In between “work” I lay in my bunk indulging in reading Eco’s “Baudolino“

I climbed out of my bunk and peeked out of the window over the sink, the one facing out towards the outdoor water tanks and the lower hut, Dave’s retreat. On the track there stood Dave, hands in his pockets, talking softly to a sea lion which apparently had spent the night on the boardwalk and needed a bit of persuasion to make room for Dave.

Looking at Dave I realised that inevitably we’ll (have to) develop a close relationship with the island’s pinniped population.

After breakfast Dave and I retreated into the lower hut. We had some work to do on our GPS loggers. The loggers are some of the ugliest pieces of high-tech I ever laid my hands on. In comparison to our two Time Depth Recorders from Wildlife Computers and Lotek, the Sirtrack GPS data loggers look like someone’s failed first attempt in pottery. The black epoxy housing has humps and bumps, and looks all but streamlined. The data cable connector protrudes from the housing and looks damn fragile; I don’t want to know what this nipple looks like after a penguin went through a bit of a hard landing on the rocks. At 130 mm length the devices are pretty bulky and with 120 grams are far from lightweight. No wonder, these things are armed with two AA Lithium batteries - which we will have to replace after every deployment by breaking open the casing. Not to mention that the glossy black colour gives the loggers a Darth Vader look.

All in all, our loggers are really ugly things - even for the prototypes they are. But they are the only GPS data loggers available. And any other methods of studying the penguins’ foraging movements are lost causes on the Snares. For radio telemetry we could not get enough distance between the tracking stations - the Snares are simply too small - not to mention that it would be a nightmare getting to and back from the aerials every day. Satellite telemetry delivers too crude data, particularly when the penguins are feeding their chicks and are only out for a day or two. So either it’s GPS or nothing.

But Dave and I have a cunning plan. We sprayed expanding foam on the beasts. The idea is to carve the foam into a hydrodynamic shape once it has hardened. That way we’ll be able to rectify some of the worst bumps on the devices and perhaps the slight floating capacity of the foam might also bring the devices’ buoyancy closer to zero - 130 gram are no chicken feed!

So that’s what Dave and I did after breakfast - turning seven ugly wannabe Darth Vaders into fake pastry. That’s exactly what the devices looked like once the foam was on.

While the cream, pardon foam, expanded and started to harden, Dave and I geared up. Melanie had asked us to help her transporting the parts of her viewing hide up to the colony. She had that hide built for her by Ian, the technician at the Department of Zoology, a guy who is not famous for flimsy jobs. Quite the opposite. The viewing hide Ian built for Mel is made of thick particle board; the walls and the roof of the long drop shaped hide are joined by wide stainless steel angle brackets. Metal loops at the top corners can be used to tie the hide to the ground. All in all a very impressing construction. But it has a major flaw.

The stuff weighs a ton. Of course, there was no way that Mel could get the pieces up to her spot by herself.

Dave and I spent the entire bloody morning shuttling back and forth between the hut and the colony, carrying insanely heavy sheets of particle board. However, it wasn’t only the weight of the stuff. Size played a role too - and the fact that both Dave and I were not quite sure whether having this monster up at the colony was actually necessary.

The size of the pieces turned Dave’s and my morning into a particularly arduous nightmare. Not only were the pieces difficult to carry under normal circumstances. But we had to literally thread the stuff through the Oleria forest with its twisted tree trunks and its meshwork of branches. On top of that - or rather at the bottom of it - we had to make our way over some extremely fragile peaty forest floor, undermined by hundreds of sooty shearwater burrows. It was - sorry for the straightforwardness here - one hell of a shit job.

But something else was rather gross too. The forest floor was littered with slaughtered sooty shearwaters - bloody skeletons with bits of flesh dangling from small rib cages that still had intact legs and wings attached. Some of the carcasses still had a head - generally with an enormous hole in roof of the skull. All fresh kills from last night.

“Skuas had big party last night”, commented Dave while he was inspecting one of the carcasses. “Those guys just wait on the forest floor for a tītī to fall out of the sky and - whack! Really cunning hunters.”

We managed to get all stuff up in three goes but it took us most of the morning. We returned to the hut around lunchtime. Mel was ready to hike up to the colony to assemble her hide. “Excellent”, she said when we told her that our mission was accomplished. Then she took off. Dave and I looked at each other as Melanie disappeared.

After lunch we too headed up to the colony. Time check out or observation plots. Would there be any signs that the male exodus was imminent? If so, we would be in business logger-wise. No point in deploying any data loggers if the penguins have no inclination to leave their nest site. The first thing we noticed up in the colony was that there was absolutely no sign that the male penguins would go to sea soon. In fact, the whole colony appeared rather dozy, bills tucked behind flippers and all.

The second thing we noticed was the monster of a viewing hide on the other side of the colony. A pair of binocculars were peeking out of the observation slit. Melanie was at work. Looking at the size of the construction I began to wonder how we actually managed to get the pieces up here. But I must say that I was equally impressed by the fact that Mel had actually managed to assemble a hide of this size in the face of Olearia branches and trunks everywhere.

The next couple of hours, I sat on my branch and gazed over my little patch of penguins. The birds had all the time in the world. I drew a map of my patch and numbered the nests. Patiently I waited to get a glimpse at the nest contents - most of the nests still have two eggs. Not bad for crested penguins which - as obligate brood reducers - have even been described to commit infanticite (see here or here).  I might add that I find the deliberateness of this activity very hard to believe… that is something that usually lies in the eye of the beholder. Here in colony A3 there are some eggs lying in between nests, but whether these were expelled or simply rolled out by accident I couldn’t tell.

Dave came over from his wee patch 50 meters away. It was cold and it started to drizzle. He’d finished mapping the nests in his plot and was ready to head on home. I thought that was a very good idea. So we went home.

And finally, for the record another sea lion episode. Dave decided to wash some of his stuff (why the hell he needs to wash clothes after a mere two days on the island is beyond me). For that he required some water which he intended to get from the lower water tank. Problem was, there was this big furry fella lying on the platform in front of the tank. Dave, an old hand in terms of Snares and sea lions (it’s his third time out here) played it cool. He slowly walked up to the sealion with his bucket. He slowly bent forward. He slowly put his bucket down. He slowly reached out for the tap. He retreated very quickly when the sealion all of a sudden lunged forward and threw an impressive, ear shattering bark at Dave.

Dave thought he made good for this moment of weakness by posing with the sea lion a moment later. But I am sure in his hairy chest (Dave’s, that is) his heart was still racing.

That was a mistake.

We shouldered our backpacks that had some water, notebooks and Palm handheld computers. And off we went, over the short boardwalk past the old castaway depot (now a tool shed ) and across the rocks beyond the penguin landing area in Station Cove. The destination of our short tramp was the our supposed workplace, the Snares penguin colony A4. The colony is located just some 100m above the hut, but it still takes about 15 minutes to get there. There is a flagged route that winds through the Oleria forest and it actually has some very short boardwalk bits. However, the boardwalks won’t fool you… you’re not on a New Zealand backcountry track.

Firstly, there are so many small, medium to large branches that constantly try to poke the tramper in the face. I learned on this first trip up the hill that I should under no circumstance go up here without a hat or cap on - an indispensable piece of armour against botanical stabs.

Secondly, there are knee deep bogs that look pretty harmless until you step into them. And I am not talking about accidentally slipping into a mud hole. I mean purposely, intentionally, being-bloody-fully-aware-what-is-going-to-happen sort of stepping into pools of mud because they are the only way to get through the otherwise impenetrable tangle of (viciously stabbing!) vegetation. It took me only 50 meters of walking to realise what a mistake it was not to wear the waterproof pants.

Thirdly, there are sea lions in the most unexpected places all along the track and you have to be very careful not to step on any tree trunks if you can avoid it. The trunk might turn out to be a sleeping sealion, and I don’t think the beast are too pleased to be stepped on by a skinny bi-ped. Fortunately, there is some sort of a sealion warning system installed for the tramper. It is called Red-billed gull – when you see a gull in the middle of the forest, you know there is a sealion somewhere nearby.

I must say that the short hike up to colony A4 already gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with the feeling of sudden panic when you spot a Red-billed gull very close to you without seeing its object of desire, i.e. the sealion. The gulls are there because they really treasure the stuff sealions throw up at regular intervals when they sleep – generally indigestible items such as bones or squid beaks. But of course there’s always something juicy coming out as well. Disgusting to us but a feast for the gulls.

To me, the Snares penguin colony A4 was quite impressive. In the middle of the forest there is this patch of mud which is crowded by the most beautiful penguin species I have had the chance to observe.

Most birds were sitting in pairs at or around their nest mounds. Some of them dozing with their bills tucked behind their flippers, others preening their partner’s feathers. Non-breeding birds lined the fringes of the colony, they sat perched on branches of Olearia trees and basked in the sun. And that brings us directly to a problem we have… the entire colony is literally engulfed by Olearia thickets that will be pretty hard to get through.

Yet, in order to deploy daata loggers - and to get them back later on - we have to be able to get to our logger penguins without causing to much disturbance to the other birds. That is pretty much not given here in colony A4.

Unfortunately, our permit restricts us to work someplace else - and after the ordeal we went through to get the permits this might be a bigger problem than it seems. Dave, as official DOC representative agreed with me and decided that we check out the working conditions at the next big colony A3, which is only a couple of hundered meters further inland from A4.

As I said, I thought A4 was impressive. Boy, was I in for a surprise. Colony A3 is one of the biggest Snares penguin colonies on the island. Roundabout 1.200 pairs occupy half a football-field-sized clearing. In the bright sunlight all I saw was black and white.

Never before have I seen that many penguins in one spot. The din was enormous, in a colony of that size there are always 20-30 pairs displaying and trumpeting, so it is a neverending cacophony of penguin honking. It is actually quite beautiful. The colony was a lot more open and accessible than A4.

Just as in the other colony, most of the birds here were pairs on and at their nest sites. There wasn’t a lot of activity amongst the breeders other than sleeping, preening, scratching or turning the eggs. Single birds walked between the nests, in a strangley hunched posture, their flippers streched forward close to their bodies, walking with a rather hurried gait. John Warham called this walking style the “slender walk” and seeing it here I must say I wouldn’t be able to find a better term for it.

Some of the slender walkers were heading out of the colony, others were coming in. Whenever a walker got too close to a breeding pair it was pecked at by the nest mount’s tennants. Interestingly, most of the walkers that were coming in ended up somewhere between nests, rather than arriving at a nest site. Apparently most of them were non-breeders. This made me wonder why the hell they would want to run the gauntlet when they don’t really have a destination. I guess its all about pretending to have a destination. Perhaps they even had a nest site somewhere in colony and have failed since? Perhaps their hormones make them believe that there must be a nest of their own somewhere in here even though there isn’t?

We had approached the colony from the North and Melanie decided that the spot would be ideal for her project. She plans to build a viewing hide for her observations, so she needs room and a relatively level area that is not too exposed to winds. Although Dave nodded he pointed out that officially we’re not (yet) entitled to work up here. He added that we would need to get approval from the DOC headquarters in Invercargill first. After all the quarrels we had with DOC Southland to get the permits to come here I agreed with Dave. I didn’t think (to be honest it was more hoping) that we’d have problems getting the Okay when we point out that A4 just won’t cut it for us. Melanie seemed quite unfazed by all this and started her work straight away.

Dave and I left her and re-entered the forest to hike around to the southern side of the colony. When we re-emerged onto a small grassy patch on the opposite side I was once again overwhelmed by the size of the colony. From here we could oversee the entire colony and it was incredible how many penguins can fit into your field of view!

I sat down on a bent down branch of an oleria tree just at the edge of the colony and gazed around me. Then I said to Dave: “You know what, this is a pretty awesome sight - and a pretty awesome place to work too! We gotta call DOC Southland rather sooner than later.”

After we had lunch back at the hut Dave radioed the mainland. No objections (!!!). Colony A3 is our new worksite! Excellent!

The rest of the day Dave and I were busy setting up the station. We fixed the solarpanels to the roof, re-installed the satellite phone (didn’t work properly), laid out cables from the generator (under the lower hut) to the main hut, and by afternoon it all looked like a sophisticated chaos of cables, boxes and ropes. We’re all set. We thought. Melanie came down and asked us whether we could help her with her viewing hide.There are some bloody bulky, bloody heavy sheets of plywood that she needs carted up the hill tomorrow. That’s gonna be fun.

22.00 hrs - Jesus Christ! I am all shaken up! I need a Whisky or two! I think I just looked death in the face. Dave and Melanie are still dabbing the tears off their cheeks, the bastards.

Well, the thing is… here on the Snares we’ve got a so-called compost toilet. It’s not the ordinary longdrop like you find millions of them strewn around New Zealand’s backcountry. Since the main idea of a compost toilet is to produce dry compost it is necessary to add as little extra moisture to the composting matter as possible. And because of that, there is a peeing ban for the toilet - at least for male users. Therefore, Dave and I - obeying this rule - usually walked along a short boardwalk that led through light bush out onto the rocks. A few meters before this boardwalk reaches the rocks, though, it follows a 70° bend around a large fern bush on the left hand side. And the area underneath this fern bush is an extremly popular sleep out with the local sealions. That I learned during the first hours on the island. Even during daylight it was quite spooky using the boardwalk, because every now and then one of the big 3-meter bulls decided he should make clear who’s the boss on the island, poked his head through the fern bush to give the bypasser an evil eye and an ear shattering “HUUAARFFGGG!!!”

Five minutes ago it happened. I had to pee. It was dark. Hence, I grabbed my headlamp and stepped out into the darkness, that was filled with the neverending honking of millions of sooty shearwaters (or Titi). Quietly I sneaked along the boardwalk, continously shining my torch to the left and right. I wasn’t to keen to get a sudden bark of one of the pelty giants. I slowly made my way to the 90° bend and peeked around the fern bush to check if the big guy who had slept there all day was still here. I squirmed under the fern bush but all I saw was an empty mudpatch - no sleeping fur bearer? Slowly, oh so slowly I sneaked around the corner to get a better angle to check that there definitely was no sealion waiting to jump at me. Indeed! No sealion under the fern, what a relieve! Phew, I thought and took a big, relaxed step towards the rocks… and stumbled right into the collosus that must have woken up only a few minutes earlier and decided to enjoy some fresh air - right on the boardwalk. I litteraly kicked the sealion in the bum!

I almost suffered a heart attack, when I suddenly felt an odd shape underneath my boot (the sealions tail) and a enormous head swung round in the darkness and plate-big eyes stared angrily at me… or so. My heart seemed to search for an escape route somewhere in my throat, my eyes were wide open in shock. With flying colours I lept round and fled in a new record time back towards the hut. All the way I had the feeling that something very big and smelly was hard on my heels, I almost felt the beasts hot, smelly breath on my neck… any moment I expected to feel its teeth digging into my shoulders… or even worse… I imagined being flattened by half a ton of angry sealion!

I slammed the door shut and shrieked to the the others “We gotta barricade! There’s a monster behind me!” I quickly explained what just happened and told them that I was certain that the Barney-from-hell was preparing to storm the hut. And what was their response? Laughter! Malice! Ridicule! But wait till they have to go out to pee! I warned them! I really did!

Bummer is… I still have to go too…

It was an early morning start, of course. The sun was on its way (although not yet above the horizon) when we boarded the catamaran at the ferry wharf in Bluff.

I was quite impressed when Jason and his mate used the crane mounted to the catamarans rear to hoist our gear - all packed into big aluminium bins - on board. It literally gave our expedition a bit of weight to think that all this stuff - actually the whole bloody boat - was only here because of us. Cool.

Round about 6am the ferry steamed out of Bluff harbour and towards Stewart Island where we would stop to pick up another guy who’d help Jason and his mate getting us to the Snares. After spending the first minutes or so on the aft deck, just to smell the sea and realising thatwe’Re on our way, Dave and I sat down at the group table at the rear end of the ferry’s passenger cabin. Anf again it struck me how weird it felt to be riding on such a big boat with no other passenger but Dave, Mel and I. What also struck me was that Dave’s eyes started to glaze over. He was drugged to the brim with sea sickness pills, the cheater.

In less than an hour we made it to Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island. During usual ferry business the trip would be an hour or even an hour and a half. But since we did not have any time to waste (see “window of opportunity” above) Jason had steamed across Foveaux Strait at full throttle. And following the same idea we zoomed into Halfmoon Bay, hit the wharf, had the third guy jump onboard and zoomed out of Halfmoon Bay again.

There was not a cloud in the sky and the sun slowly and utterly majestically inched its way up rom the horizon. The sea was calm. Well, relatively calm. As a matter of fact, it was a bit rough and every now and then the ferry hit waves that were somewhat bigger and sent spray splashing all over the boat. So it really was bumpy. But given that there were 5m swells here just a few days ago it was calm.

I guess Dave and Mel would not agree to my definition of calm. Mel had assumed a horizontal position as soo as we had left Halfmoon Bay. Whether she wastrying to catch up some sleep I cannot say. But it all looked a bit uncomfortable and it seemed more like she was trying to meditate away from unwellness. Dave’s sea sickness pills obviously were nothing but placebos. Because we hadn’t long passed Stewart Island’s South Cape when he started to look rather green around his nose. The two of us sat out on the aft deck watching sooty shearwaters and Buller’s albatross glide by… trying to focus on the horizon. For although I did not feel seasick, my body nevertheless realised that it wasn’t on terra firma anymore.

At about 11am the Snares appeared as a faint silhouette on the horizon. I left my position inside the rubber dinghy that was resting tied up on the aft deck to get a better look round the side of the boat but quickly returned to the rubber dingh… looking ahead with those waves hitting us head on was simply no fun.

After Dave had fed the fish for the third or fourth time, we got word from the skipper that our arrival at the Snares was imminent and that we should get ourselves ready for the landing procedure. I had the feeling that this would involve the rubber dinghy. Looking at the “calm” seas around us left me a bit concerned about the prospect of riding in that nutshell packed with field gear and food boxes. But, the closer we got the the island, the less bumpy the ride became. Actually, finally we could peek around the sides and marvel at the fleck of land in front of us. The Snares… we made it!

When I saw the lush green of the forest I wondered why George Vancouver decribed the Snares as “barren and rugged” when he discovered the island in 1791. Then again, he passed it in the middle of a horrible storm with severel meters of water in his ship’s bilge… certainly not the time for detailed bonatical examinations. As far as I know he also sailed past the eastern side of the island, we were looking at it from the West. Another thing that amazed me was the number of seabirds that zoomed past the boat. Cape pigeons, sooty shearwaters, diving petrels, fairy prions, and albatross were all around us. Particularly the sooties seemed to get more by the minute, there were clouds of them.

When the catamaran reached Station Cove I could see and hear them. Snares penguins, it seemed as if thousands of them were sitting on the rocks. This certainly was a sight different from what I had seen in the past few years on mainland New Zealand, where the penguins tend to keep to themselves. Here it was like a huge species outing. The entire coast seemed to be dotted with penguins. I saw single birds trumpeting loud with bills pointing high into the sky and flippers spread out - an impressive display. Other birds were squabbling over roosts. Penguins were walking from the forest to the water, others were heading the opposite way. There was a group of birds in the water, croaking as if they had sore throats (at least that what it sounded to me… I could only compare it to the calls of the Little and Yellow-eyed penguins I knew). Another group was actually well behind our boat, the birds porpoising artistcally towards the coast. Their yellow crests glowing in the sun. The water itself was darl blue but crystal clear. I thought I could even see the penguins glide under out boat and -

“Thomas, stop dreaming and start packing!”

Dave got me out of my entrancement. From here on bird watching and amazement was history. We had to land. Our gear was packed into the rubber dinghy that already floated next to the boat (when did that go in the water?). We heaved the fish bins with food, aluminum boxes with gear, backpacks, solar panels, generator and what-have-you into the dinghy where the mate was operating the small outboarder. I was the first to go over. I sat straddles on the boxes, clinging for dear life to sides of the dinghy. And we were off. The five minute ride towards the tiny opening of the boat harbour was much calmer than I thought it would be. When we chugged into the boat harbour I could not help but think that “boat harbour” was a somewhat exaggerated title for this… crevasse?… I could hardly imaging that a boat would be able to get in here. And even though the sea was calm, it rolled in impressive waves into the opening. Boat harbour is short - less than 100m long I would say. But it is pretty well sheltered as it arches northwards around Station Point so that the boat landing area is out of the direct line of the waves rolling into the harbour.

I hopped ashore and almost kneeled down. Not because I felt in awe for the place (although it was magical to be finally here), but because my legs were all wobbly from the six and a half hours boat ride. Around me I saw sea lions. Bloody big sea lions. However, before I could wonder whether they might dislike my presence the mate had started to toss me our gear.

The dinghy shuttled between ferry and the landing five or six times, and the mountain of gear that piled up on the rocks kept growing and growing. With the second load, Melanie had joined me and, finally, Dave jumped ashore with the last load. After a brief good bye and good luck, the rubber dinghy whizzed ot of boat harbour. We were on our own.

I have the feeling that the rest of the day was entirely devoted to carrying all our stuff up to the huts. This certainly had a bit of running-the-gauntlet as we had to perform a slalom around the sleeping mountains of fur aka sea lion bulls, that were lying everywhere, including the track up to the huts. The Snares Station consists of two huts, the lower labortatory hut which had large work benches and storage shelves plus a tiny two bunk bedroom. Dave claimed the latter to himself… he wants to have some privacy. Which means that I will be sharing the main hut (three bunks) where we will be living. Anyway, all our gear had to go into the laboratory hut first. We had to adhere to strict quarantine procedures which meant that we had to lock the door and unpack all our gear in there. If we had a critter such as a mouse, rat, or whatever as a stowaway on one of our bixes it would not have anywhere to go and we could take care of it. However, how we would catch a mouse in the sheer chaos that reigned inside the lab hut after we had crammed all our stuff in there was beyond me.

We found nothing. Which wasn’t really surprising considering that we had already gone through an intensive quarantine check in Invercargill. After a quick lunch of sandwiches we started to put everything in its place. Food tins etc. were to be sorted and put on the storage shelves, the gas bottles and fuel containers had to be hauled up to the fuel shed that lies just past the longdrop. The gas cooker had to be installed, same applied to the generator the VHF radio and the satellite phone (the latter of which wasn’t a safety requirement but sheer luxury). We were busy for the rest of the day.

However, before the day was over the Snares had another welcome spectacle for us in stock. The clouds of sooty shearwaters that we had observed while approaching the island shifted from their orbit out at sea to circle in thousands over the island. At first it looked like a giant cloud of mosquitoes that hovered over our heads. But the closer nightfall drew the lower the birds were flying. We saw some of the crashland through the canopy of the forest - not by accident, there’s simply no elegant way to land on this island.