Outside the hut it's blowing hard. Since a few days we have pretty rough weather here on the Snares. Every now and then heavy downpours rattle down on the hut roof, just to be followed by brief and incredibly bright sunny periods before another shower hammers down from dark rolling clouds. The hut shakes in heavy wind gusts that make the timber walls moan. The wind comes from a different direction every day. Especially easterlies are particularly nasty because they throw some incredible seas onto the rocky shore of Station Point which rock the ground and the hut on it like short earthquakes. Unimpressed by the natural forces at work the penguins - most of them feeding chicks now - come out of the boiling sea in an endless single file. It’s a really impressive sight to observe the birds landing in these conditions without getting smashed to a pulp... although it’s not without risks for the observer. It is as if the roaring forties wanted to show us what they're made of.

It's exactly that type of weather that we need to be stuck on the Snares until doomsday. Originally we had planned to get back to the mainland this weekend. This is a no-goer because the ferry has a scheduled servicing and is out of duty. So the plan is to go back on Tuesday (12. November). But it seems as if once more the weather has some objections to our plans...

All of our logger deployments yielded not a single line of data. Our mood was pretty low after the disappointing performance of the hi-tech GPS loggers (that proved to be rather hi-unsuitable). The icing of the cake was the dive logger (TDR) penguin that did not come back to it's nest. Every day we hoped to find it at its nest where its lonely female continuously took some beating from neighbourhood punks. Our last flickers hope plunged into abyssal depths when the female thought she had enough and abandoned the nest. This in turn lowered the likelihood that we would be able to find the TDR penguin at its (now empty) nest - if it ever returned! In other words: there was a good chance that we would miss the bird even if it was on the island. And with it we would miss our logger. Not to mention the data that was stored on it - our 'only working' data logger.

Needless to mention how thrilled we were when the bird all of a sudden sat on its nest one day - with its precious load! But to cut a long story short... our 'only working' logger stopped logging before the bird went to sea. That was it then.

Well... Dave and I won’t be coming back empty handed. There are also the stomach samples... We caught unfortunate penguins on the landing close to the hut and flushed their stomachs with clear water, so that we could sort through and analyze their vomit. Reason for the drill was to determine the food spectrum of Snares Crested penguins. Overall, stomach flushing is an awful procedure that nobody really wants to get through, neither the penguins nor Dave nor me. To be honest... we hate it just as much as the penguins certainly do. Stomach flushing is extremely stressful for the penguins (that get a thin hose forced down their throats), for Dave (whose fingers get chewed up by outraged penguins), and for me (who is responsible for this mess).

If the procedure is such an awful experience for everyone... why do we go through it at all? Because we not only gain important insights of the penguins' biology, but also collect hard evidence that may come in handy for the protection of the penguins and other seabirds. The Snares Islands may be rated "Minimum Impact" islands. However, the penguins' (and other seabirds) main habitat is the ocean - and the ocean could rather be described as a "Maximum Impact" zone. Like in any other ocean, fisheries have a major impact on the marine environment and exert incredible pressure on the marine ecosystem. To determine if fisheries have (or may have) a negative influence on the penguins' resources we need to know what these resources comprise of.

All in all, we relieved 24 penguins of their stomach contents. We had the permit to stomach flush 30 birds, but neither the penguins nor Dave nor me felt enthusiastic enough to go for the quota... what we've got is enough. For example, it is enough to say that almost one third (60%) of the penguins' diet consists of one single krill species (Euphausia lucens). The other third is equally distributed between fish and cephalopods (squid and octopus). Curiously, the fish fraction is dominated by pipefish (Syngnathidae). The curious thing about it is that pipefish are generally not pelagic - fish that occur in the open ocean. For all I know, pipefish are benthic (bottom dwelling) animals (with their small fins they are definitely no good long distance swimmers). However, not more than 400m offshore the Snares are surrounded by depths of 100m and more and therefore it seems as if penguins catch their pipefish in the coastal waters of the islands; the coastline of the Snares totals to no more than 10km. In other words, either the shallow coastal waters are incredibly packed with pipefish or... well, up to now, we can't really come up with a logical 'or'... and that is the curious thing!