Three days ago, on 11. October, the so-called "Exodus" of the male Snares Crested penguins started. The males have spent the last 10 to 12 days together with their mates on or at their nest. They now go to sea for 10 or so days to feed and put on some considerable weight. They'll need every gram they can get, because after they return to their nests they will take over the incubation of the eggs while the females go fishing. The males will stay on the nest until the chicks hatch and stay with them throughout the chick guard stage, while the female will return daily to feed their offspring.

There is an amazing synchronicity in the timing of the males' Exodus. Roundabout 15,000 male penguins leave the Snares Islands within a timeframe of 3 or 4 days. This timing is not only amazing but very important for the females' sake - and that is because of nasty neighbours and violent punks that stroll the colonies. On the first day of the Exodus, there were still lots of pairs together at their nest. The few single females had a really hard time and we observed some really violent scenes at their ests.

Some males seem to discover their violent side when their neighbour's left. They just waddle over to the lonely female how is incubating her eggs, and start pecking at her until her feathers fill the air around the nest. Not to mention the powerful flipper slaps. The females smaller than males and are entirely caught up in the process of incubating and preventing that the eggs roll out of the nest. So all they can do during a neighbour's attack, is spread their flippers for stabilisation and hide their faces under their bellies, while their backsides get torn, beaten and stomped on. A really nasty sight. Dave actually observed a male bullying his neighbours wife until her single egg rolled out of the nest. All the female penguin could do was look aghast at the lost egg - penguins seem to be incapable of rolling their eggs back into the nest (geese, for example, are pretty good recovering rolled out eggs). Well, her egg rolled out - that was it for this year. Most of the times the males' violent behaviour seems to be the Prologue to stealing nesting material and take it over to their own nest. However, in quite a number of observations the males just seemed to live out their violent sides as they obviously were not interested in pinching nesting material. Therefore, it's no wonder that most males are keen to go to sea together. If your neighbours swimming next to you, you can be sure that he won't act as a hooligan towards your wife.

Well, now the Exodus is underway. During the next few days, an endless procession of male Snares Crested penguins meanders through the forest down to the waterfront. Accordingly there's some thick traffic on the mud paths...

And also accordingly Dave and I sprang into action. We had used the previous days to fashion some masks for the GPS loggers from expanding foam and epoxy glue (to give the original shape of the devices a more hydrodynamic form). Now we had to program the devices, do a last check-up and glue the foam masks onto the loggers with silicon. All in all, we won't be able to win any beauty contests with the GPS loggers. During the 90's some detailed studies on the optimal shape of back-mounted devices on penguins resulted in recommendations what loggers and transmitters should look like to reduce the additional drag as far as possible. Unfortunately, not much of that knowledge seems to be incorporated in the design of the Sirtrack GPS logger cases. Our masks hide the worst dents and bumps on the devices and make it easier to attach the loggers to the penguins' backs.

But apart from the unfortunate shape, the GPS loggers seem to work. This is not the case in 3 of our 4 dive computers (TDRs or Timed Depth Recorder). Two TDRs seem to have suffered from a sudden stroke of flat batteries (both Wildlife Computers MK7) and another TDR (Lotek LTD) died presumably of a Hardware failure. Thus, we only have one dive computer left to examine the penguins' diving behaviour... and the question how long the battery of that one will last seems reasonable. And that leaves us with the GPS loggers as our biggest trump determining the foraging behaviour of the penguins...

The day before yesterday, Dave and I crawled through the thick forest up to colony A3 to equip the first volunteers with several thousand dollars worth of devices. It was relatively late in the day and we started attaching the first GPS logger at around 4pm to the male penguin from nest CENTRE#12. We use Rory Wilson's brilliant TESA tape method to attach the devices to the penguins' lower backs - a technique that we also have used on Little penguins two years ago. (RealVideo of the attachment procedure: [56k] - [ISDN] - [DSL]). The Tesa Tape, an industrial adhesive cloth tape, can be removed easily from the penguin's feathers when we retrieve the loggers in a week or so.

To attach a GPS logger takes roundabout 30 minutes. The first two loggers we did that day were rather disappointing. The first logger was skewed quite a bit, the second logger sat too low on the penguins back and apparently impeded the bird a bit when it was walking. With the third GPS logger we finally got it right, but by then the temperatures had dropped considerably and all of a sudden the Tesa Tape didn't stick that well. That the adhesive potency of the tape decreases with temperature was new for us. After we eventually had finished the third GPS loggers Dave's and my backs were about as skewed as the first GPS logger and my fingers were frozen which made it pretty hard for me to attach the fourth device of the day - a dive computer. But by the time we had grabbed and measured the bird and prepared the Tesa tape the temperature was that low, that the tape stuck like a blank piece of paper: not at all. All we could do was release the bird and pack our stuff. To make the misery complete the third GPS bird got chased away by the female of it's apparent nest and disappeared somewhere in the forest, which in turn raised the question if it was actually just a bystander we mistook for the male of that nest. In that case it could be quite hard to get back the logger as there is no need for the bird to return to that nest or even the colony if it doesn't have any relatives waiting for it. So the sum of the first day of attaching devices was: two bad attached devices, one possible runaway loner (?), freezing fingers and aching backs. We headed back to the hut in a state of grumpy silence.