The Last Shadow Puppets, Queens of the Stone Age & Eagles Of Death Metal @ Brian O’Connor Benefit Concert, Club Nokia, LA, 12th Aug. 2010

Posted by alainjohannes

Signy Island - Week Five

13th January – All lab work and no field play makes Jes a grumpy fucker. Must think of the scientific papers…think of the papers….must. get. papers. WONT ANYONE THINK OF THE PAPERS!

Not much gone on so I’ll write about the mundane stuff. We start work at 8.30am every day, I normally kick off by doing the monitoring of all my experiments early on. At 10.30, we all grind to a temporary halt  and converge on the lounge where we will do the days crosswords from the emailed newspaper that we get: Several A4 pages of the latest headlines and a few paragraphs of story. About 60% of the paper is sport, so we are largely in the dark about what is actually going on in the world. But we do get 2 crosswords which are a significant feature in our daily lives. At first, I avoided them because I didn’t get all the answers on my first go (I have a petulant side that doesn’t like doing things Im not good at). But have since realised that that is normal, and that actually Im not bad at them. And its also good for the noggin. 1-2pm we stop for lunch, and then unless busy will stop again at 16.30pm for another bash at the crossword if we haven’t already finished it. Back to work again and then we roll the dinner tables out for 18.30, immediately followed by gash duties. Gash is a shipping/military term for chores. A lot of the slang that’s used in BAS comes from the military or merchant navy probably because there isn’t much practical difference between them. Other than we science other than war. Just that small thing… After dinner and chores, we are done for the day. Or not, as is usually my case. Sometimes we will get together and watch an episode of something - It was Game of Thrones, now we are onto Deadwood. Or maybe we will go for a hike, perhaps go out watch wildlife and take photos, or just sit in the lab until midnight torturing bugs and hoping that this will all pay off and you’ll be able to write your own post-doc grant, thereby setting yourself up in employment for at least another few years…

16th Jan – I got out!! I HAD A DAY OFF!! I went over to North Point, unsurprisingly at the Northernmost tip of the Island, with Stacey, Alex and Megumu. I was meant to be on a reccy of my control field site over the moss banks on that side of the ice cap, but ended up spending the whole day helping Stacey count penguin chicks. PENGUIN CHICKS! First we hiked up to the Skidoo depot, and then drove lengthways along the ice cap for a couple of miles to Spindrift Col. From here it’s another few miles hiking down mountain across moss banks and scree slopes. The Point was bird mecca: Colonies of Giant Petrels, huge majestic birds that are like the Albatrosses’ ugly cousin, but wonderful none-the-less; Adelie penguins, those of goggly eye fame and now to be known to me also as the muckiest penguins of them all. If their chicks weren’t brown to start with I’m sure they would have ended up that colour. You can see their colonies from a distance, big pink-brown splodges of poo. Then there were two Chinstrap colonies, a more refined penguin in my opinion; and a large and sprawling Gentoo colony that had spread over about 500m2. The Gentoos’ are quite elegant looking birds with neat black heads and orange beaks, and a clear eye that is ringed by white. Enough to define it, but not so much as to make them look like cartoons, unlike the Adelies. Up on the point proper was a Blue-Eyed shag colony of about 200 nests. Bloody odd birds. They build their nests like little clay islands on the rocks, and then shit all around them so that they look like they are marooned on a teeny tiny volcano in a sea of poo. The dinosaur chicks that they raise in place of actual birds were nearly the size of the adults, yet were still feeding like they were a fraction of the size. Birds regurgitate their catch for their young, but the shags do it all back to front, seeming to swallow their young, let them feed on the catch within, and then regurgitating the bewildered chick back up. Makes me gag just recalling it. Weirdos.

In between herding chicks about so that we could feasibly count them , which is one of the cutest things Ive ever seen by the way, I sat in amongst the bird colonies and watched and learned. I learnt the moves of the bonding dance between a breeding pair of Chinstraps, watched how a Giant Petrel took flight simply by stretching out it’s wings and letting the breeze do the rest, and obsessed over getting a shot of them coming into land, like huge feathered planes. I saw how Adelies, for all their ridiculousness were very protective over not just their own chicks but also others. I saw a Gentoo chick fight off a skua twice its size and then saunter back to colony like nothing had happened. And I also held a Chinstrap chick. And nearly squeaked my way into oblivion in the process it was all so damn adorable. A grey bundle of soft warm down that fitted into my two cupped hands…and my pocket if there weren’t other people around.

As we wrapped up for the day and started the hike back up to the ice cap, the sky started to break apart and the grey that had hung above us all day split into shards and pockets of brightness. In the distance the light fell in silver bands across a glacier and lit up icebergs that sat in its bay. It was all very moving. I needed this day.