Disappointment. So far, our project suffers from an extreme form of success evasion. About everything that could go wrong went wrong. No exceptions from this rule. It all started with the endless and unnerving negotiations with DOC for the work permit. It went on after DOC finally issued the permit (with grinding teeth) with the 2 week delay due to endless storms over the subantarctic. Then during the first week on the Island, three of our four TDRs died various sudden deaths (not to mention the decease of both my cameras – SLR and Digital). Considering that I think it was only fair that we could expect a bit of luck with our work from then on. But it seems its fresh out.

Friday I sat at the penguin landing at Station Cove. Since a few days now, the males are dripping back in from their week-and-a-few-days foraging trips at sea. Most of the males look incredibly fat – it's more like they're rolling rather then walking back to their nests to relieve their patient and starving spouses. Accordingly, we expected our logger birds to show up soon as well. So I sat on the rocks and squirmed at every passing penguin's back, to see if it carried a precious load. And suddenly – shock!!! There waddled one of the guys, with a bulky black thing attached with soggy Tesa-Tape. Dave, was up at the colony checking nests and looking out for equipped penguins. I was alone. So all I could do was to go for it on my own. I grabbed the bird with a net. The penguin was truly incensed (and he all thee right to feel that way) when I carried him over into our laboratory, where I covered his head with a cloth hood and placed the birds on my lap. When I started to peel off the Tesa-Tape the bird was very still – as if he knew that he got rid of this bloody extra baggage on his back. He had to carry this thing with him for 12 days at sea!

It took me just 15 minutes to get the logger off and remove all the Tesa-Tape from the birds feathers (he only lost 2 feathers during the process). After I had weighed the birds I released him on the penguin track where he gave me one outraged look and then toddled off towards his colony. (Mel observed the bird arriving at his nest about an hour later.) I ran up to the hut and booted my computer. I was just about to connect to the logger, when Dave came rushing in. "And?" he gasped. I clicked on "Download Data". The downloading took only a fraction of a second. I felt an ice cube in my stomach. I clicked my way into the download directory – and my face paled. The file was only 3 kb. "What", asked Dave obviously worried. "Almost no data recorded", I replied faintly. I opened the logger file. Overall, the logger had recorded only 16 positions during the last 14 days. All of them were recorded on the first day, in the colony. Not a single position from the 12 days at sea - bugger all! A complete failure.

Yesterday, the second GPS penguin returned to its nest. Dave and I removed the logger late that day. Again the Tesa-Tape came off the feathers quite nicely and in the end you couldn't tell that there ever was some strange device attached to this penguin's back for 2 weeks. With dampened expectations we walked back to the hut. We downloaded the data and were surprised: the file contained 20 kb of GPS data. Woo-hoo! Unfortunately again, all positions recorded during the first 24 hours of deployment. Not a single position during the entire 12 day foraging trip.

Today, we relieved three of the five missing logger birds of their scientific burdens. All three were GPS loggers. With grim certainness I carried all three loggers back to the hut. No surprises, when I finally downloaded the data. All loggers ceased to work as soon as the penguins touched the water. After these drawbacks, our hope to get anything useful out of the GPS loggers is down to zero. The worst thing about it is the feeling that we stressed the birds twice (during the equipment and retrieval procedures) and probably impeded their diving abilities considerably for almost nothing. Now we're missing one more GPS logger and the only working TDR. The latter is the only device we still have hopes to get foraging data from.

Dave and I are brooding over the GPS loggers. Maybe there's a way to make them work after all. But more and more we get the utter feeling, that the devices have other, more serious flaws than the unfortunate shape. Either, the salt water switch is not working, or the GPS unit is too slow, or the battery power doesn't last longer than 24 to 36 hours. We still have hope that we can modify the unit's loggers to squeeze a bit of information out of them. But there is not a lot we can do. If it's the GPS units or the batteries, we're done for…