After a couple of dingy transfers our gear, compactly packed in rodent proof plastic bins, stacked up to an impressive wall on the sea lion shit encrusted granite rocks of the boat landing. It took us nearly two hours to get all the stuff up the muddy track to the hut, some 50 meters away. That was to some extent due to the 2 extremely big sea lion bulls that were snoring in the middle of the track and refused to make way. Instead they greeted us with unpleasant snorts while trying to give us the evil eye - or rather the evil droopy eye. After a while they realized that we were persistent about getting past them and so one of them buggered off into the sea while the other rolled over to the side of the track.

An important penguin landing site is not far from the hut. And pretty soon an endless Trek of Snares Crested penguins will be coming out of the tree daisy forest and head towards the sea and vice versa. Most of the penguin colonies are located some distance inland and getting to them is quite a task. The tree trunks aren't straight but rather bend in every possible direction forming a system of - well - "Snares" that sometimes make it pretty hard to get through. Apart from that, one has to take special care not to crash into any of the numerous Sooty Shearwater burrows. The penguins themselves seem to prefer the wettest, soggiest and muddiest bits of the Snares as their breeding grounds. It is a rather disgusting sight to see some of the black and white birds dip their yellow-crowned head into the muck to dive for some submerged half rotten sticks that may make good nesting material. Yuck! Most of the nests are, however, finished and either male or female sit on the eggs while their partner dozes beside the nest his beak oddly tugged behind a flipper. In a few days, the males will head off to spend 10 or so days at sea feeding while the female keeps on incubating. When the males leave Dave's and my hours strikes - then we'll attach 6 GPS loggers and 2 dive computers to volunteering penguins. Until then we try to get organized and try to absorb the amazing surrounds.

On Tuesday we checked out the colony we have the permission to work on. First result: colony A4 is just not suitable for any of our proposed research. Hence, we have to improvise. And that means that we will swap our efforts to a different colony (A3) which is further away from the hut but is perfect. We have informed DOC Southland about this and they admitted that it was Dave's call to decide. And so he did. A3 it is then. A3 is the second largest colony on the Snares: 1250 breeding pairs distributed over 1200 square meters. That not only results in one head-spinning chaos of black-and white spots that move around but also produces a never ending din of penguins croaking, honking and coughing.

A dramatic (if not slightly hilarious) sight are the gauntlet runs of single penguins that try to get to their nest that is somewhere in the centre of the colony. They point the flippers forward, lower their heads as far as possible, presumably close their eyes and run. Each runner gets pecked by most the occupants of the nests he has to pass and it must be living hell - from outside the colony it strangely reminds us of Monthy Python's Ministry of Silly Walks.

Yesterday, Mel started her observation at the colony, while Dave and I spent some time on the other side of the colony trying to point out and map nests we will monitor daily. And it quickly became clear that it's pretty tough to do so without marking the birds. DOC Southland unfortunately did not permit us to mark the birds (we thought about colour marking that washes off after a couple of weeks). This not only complicates the identification of single birds (to determine if it's the male or the female we're looking at) but also makes it difficult to point out the nests you want to monitor as there are no landmarks to orient at in that chaos of nesting birds and gauntlet runners. Well, we'll make the best of it...