We wait. A week has passed since we equipped 7 penguins with loggers (6 GPS devices and 1 TDR). All of our birds are at sea. The last few days their females snooze solo on their nests. The only distraction they get are the violent assaults of young punks or envious neighbours. Overall, it is much quieter now in colony A3. A few trumpet concerts of non-breeding pairs or pairs that lost their eggs and every now and then the thump-thump-thump of aggressive penguins flipper-slapping the backs of lonely incubating females.

A few days ago we witnessed a rather odd case of nest aggressiveness. An apparently non-breeding alien female attacked another incubating female with brute force. It was by far the most violent assault I've observed so far. After a good quarter of an hour, the assaulting female finally succeeded in dragging the incubating bird of its nest - only to take over the incubation herself! We have no idea what that was all about. Was the assaulting female the real mother off the eggs in that nest? Or was the assaultress a frustrated childless female that finally wanted to live out her motherly instincts? Unfortunately that nest was neither covered by Dave's/mine nor Melanie's observation areas so that we have no further information on its occupant history. Mel and I only noticed that nest simultaneously because of the extremely loud flipper slaps that rolled like thunder over the colony. That was 4 days ago. Since then the nest has been occupied by a female incubating the eggs. Hard to tell if it's the assaultress. We'll have an eye on that nest.

Apart from that, there is not much the females have to do, apart from turning the eggs every now and then, stretching their necks and flippers between naps and scratching that itchy spot behind their ears. Accordingly, there is not much else to report from colony A3. At the penguin landing close to our hut, however, on 15. October at around 18.30hrs, Mel and I observed our TDR bird go to sea! I was sitting on the rocky foreshore taking pictures of a group of penguins that hopped from rock to rock, when suddenly the equipped bird jumped straight into view line of my lens! I was flabbergasted! In this endless stream of male Snares penguins that continuously poured out of the forest, I actually managed to encounter the needle in the haystack! I mean, we estimate that at least 4.000 penguins used this landing as launching point during the last couple of days.

Our penguin did not seem to be affected by the logger on its back. Quite the opposite! He actually led a pack of males down to the waters edge. The penguins do not like to get wet alone. Instead, if one penguin decides that he's hungry enough to take the plunge into the cold water, other penguins take that chance and join him. The group then waddles towards the edge of the rocks and wait for the next wave to come in. And than it's jumping head first Eavel Kneavel style. Sometime the penguins miss the wave and the whole bunch tumbles a few metres over rocks and kelp before finally hitting the water. But once in the water they literally take off when they quickly bring a considerable distance between them and the land by diving close to the surface, jumping out of the water dolphin style and flying for an instance (the so-called 'porpoising').

And a rather sad notice at the end. The day before yesterday I buried my digital camera. The bloody thing slipped out of my pocket while I was kneeling to take slide pictures with Dave's SLR camera. And of course the digital camera rolled down a small slope just to drop into the only puddle near and far. It's a total loss. I had it for 3 months. My Nikon SLR camera died during the first few day on the Snares of a motor failure - hence, photographically I went blind when the Digicam decided to take a bath. Well, I may use Dave's SLR from time to time and we still have his Digital Video camera to capture a few images for the websites.