Kangaroo Tales: My Experience as an Alien: First Trip to Bowen Island

The blog post that everyone (including me) has been waiting for. PENGUIN TIME!

So this Thursday around 5:30pm, I braved the Sydney bus system for the second time, and travelled to UNSW to meet my advisor Sandra for our 2 hour car ride out to Jervis Bay. As I made my way into the city, it started to downpour and didn't show any sign of letting up as I arrived on campus. (I prayed it was not a bad omen :P) I met up with Sandra in the parking lot, who was accompanied with another PhD researcher who works in her office (Oliver, who is also from Germany and is studying Bottlenose Dolphins in Western Australia), and an honors student named Martin, who is about my age and is friends with Sandra from the work they've done together in the genetics labs at UNSW.

At 7:00pm, the four of us piled into Sandras rental car along with all our gear (including fencing equipment, food for the entire weekend and all our personal gear) and we started our journey. With a quick stop for kebabs around 9:00, we finally arrived at the guest house maintained by the Booderee National Park (which contains both Jervis Bay and Bowen Island). The house was sparsely furnished but suited our basic needs quite well.

Living room of the house. Could be very comfortable long term, if needed.

We woke at 8:00am for a quick breakfast and then drove to the National Park station where we met up with Martin Fortescue, the national park services manager, who knows Bowen Island very well, having conducted his own PhD study on the Bowen Island penguin population some 20 years ago. He took us over in a boat, helped us carry our belongings up to the house and showed us around a bit. The house
was a bit on the rustic side, having been built about years ago by Martin himself and another ranger at the field station. It has four bunk beds, a modest kitchen and a temperamental electrical system run by solar panels. There is a shower but it has stopped working due to a broken hookup between the water tank and the house and the toilet does not flush and requires a bucket of water to flush it. But it became very cozy after a while, although I could not imagine staying there for months at a time, which Martin did when he was conducting his own studies.

Home sweet home!

Just before we left, these two fellows landed next to the boat ramp

I couldn't get over how large they were! They could eat the US species for breakfast!

On the way to Bowen Island, aboard the Sea Eagle!

Our gear

Accompanying us for part of the first day was Joel, a reporter for the ABC radio station who was doing a story on the Little Penguin population for an ecology segment, which included interviews with Martin and Sandra on their research. To demonstrate for Joel and us, the correct way to handle the penguins, Martin reached into a nearby burrow and pulled out an almost fully fledged chick ("fledged"= lost all its baby fluff. Most of the chicks we saw had lost most of their fuzz, with only a couple of small patches remaining. It looks really funny when it comes off, and makes them look like they're wearing fur mufflers). To pull out a penguin, you have to reach your hand into the burrow depths and try to feel for their feet, because you only want to pull them out feet first, never by their wings or any other body part. That's not the say the penguins are willing to come out - the word that most adequately describes them is, "feisty." :P

Reaching into the burrow to find a penguin

A typical burrow

Another burrow

Covering their eyes helps them calm down. The black and white pattern helps them blend in while out at sea: floating on the top of the water, they are hard for aerial predators to see (ex: white-bellied sea eagles), while their white bellies makes it hard for fish to see them from above.

Penguin tongue! It's serrated to help them grab and hold onto fish

First penguin interaction of Bowen Island

After Martin and Joel left, Sandra took the rest of us to start conducting the "burrow occupancy checks," on burrows that she had previously located on prior trips to the island. This entailed looking into the burrows with flash lights to see if they were occupied (either by adults, chicks or both). Usually one parent will stay in the burrow with the chick/s while the other goes out to sea to fish. Occasionally both parents will go out to hunt (or if there is a single parent raising the chicks), leaving the babies alone. Depending on how far the fishing grounds are, the adults can be gone for days at a time. The Bowen Island colony is lucky in that their feeding areas are relatively close by, allowing daily feeding trips to be made. (This is also good news for us because it increases our chances of recapturing a marked individual).

On the first day we just left the penguins in their burrows but on the second and third day we started pulling out adult/chick pairs if we found them in the burrows so that Sandra could collect some blood samples from their feet. She is analyzing and comparing the genetics of parent/offspring pairs to study connectivity between colonies and genetic dispersal. Although I will not be using any of the genetic results, I got to assist Sandra in the actual collection process as well as help by restraining the "subjects." This meant that i got to get some face time with some very adorable baby penguin chicks.
Like I mentioned before, most were almost fully fledged and looked a lot like the adults, but here and there we ran into some pretty young individuals.

Sandra doing burrow checks

Collecting blood from a foot vein

Martin weighing a penguin

Martin learning what it mean to be a penguin

Real "field work."

Some were better subjects than others

Fuzzy baby!

Fuzzy bum! They start losing their baby fluff from the tail first. The new adult feathers are more bluish than the full adults, providing us with some method of differentiating between the ages.

More penguin cuteness!

Dreams do come true! :D

After the burrow checks were completed, we spent the rest of the day settling in and getting used to our surroundings. Towards mid day we headed down to the beach to set up the fencing for the recaptures. During Sandra's previous trips she marked about 50 individuals with microchips and released them back into the colony. Based on how many she is able to "recapture" or re-encounter on follow up trips, will allow us to estimate the total population.

We ran the fencing along the top of the beach, with a funnel feeding into a small makeshift corral. About half an hour to forty-five minutes after sundown, "rafts" of penguins start washing up on the beach, after a long day of feeding out at sea. They are all eager to get back to their burrows since many of them are parents with hungry chicks at home to feed. However our fence stands between them and their destination, and the only available option is to follow the fence into the corral. Once we had a group contained, we would be able to check each individual for a microchip before letting it go outside the fence. If a penguin did have a chip, we would write down the number, weigh it, and then release it.

After a dinner of spaghetti with marinara sauce, we bundled up against the wind and potential penguin bites, ("dressing for success" we called it), and walked down the beach, in time to catch a beautiful sunset. Armed with head lamps and pairs of heavy duty work gloves, we each took up a position around the net and sat down to wait for the first raft to arrive. They literally do arrive in rafts - at first you hear, rather then see them in the darkening twilight, the frantic paddling of about 20 flippers, propelling their owners towards the beach. As my eyes adjusted, I could just make out a bunch of small, beaked heads poking up above the surface. Once they landed, the group stood by the water for a while, trying to determine whether it was safe to cross. Then they would slowly make their way across the beach, stumbling on the soft, deep sand. Occasionally something would spook them and they would scuttle back to the safety of the water, only to try and gear up the courage for another attempt. We let them make their way into the corral, before we switched on our headlamps and started penguin chasing. For such small birds with such tiny legs, they can move quick when they want to. And what they lack in size they definitely make up for in spirit. If they felt cornered they would turn around and face us, beaks open, making a sort of hissing noise, while flailing their flippers in an attempt to make themselves look bigger and more intimidating. (It was actually more adorable than scary). Even once we actually grabbed them, they refused to give up - despite the gloves my hands received numerous bites and bruises.

New look: Penguin in the headlights

confused penguins

stampede!

scanning with microchip reader

The first night was not very successful - we only got 11 recaptures out of 189 penguins total. Compared to Sandra's previous results, this was not a very high number. But the next night was better, we got more than 15 recaptures. That night we also got to meet a very special chick that we named, "Oreo." (I'll let you figure out why ;) )

Say hello to "Oreo!"

We're hoping that the Toronga Zoo in Sydney or another facility might take interest in Oreo and want to house him, since his chances of survival in the wild are not that good (given his odd coloration which will impede his hunting success as well as make him an easier target for predators). We often did some of the blood samples at night, and I realized that by scooping the penguins up in the dark, shining bright lights in their faces, holding them down (and potentially covering their eyes with a cloth), pricking their feet to draw blood and then dropping them back on the ground.....it all sounds a lot like an alien abduction story :P (hence the name of this post).

Our daily schedule went something like this:

Sleep till 10 am, breakfast till around 11:00-11:30. Do half the burrow checks, midday break around 12:30-1:30. Finish the burrow checks/blood sampling. Laze around/go to the beach/read/nap until 6:00 when we made dinner. 7:00pm head down to the beach to fix the fencing (we had to take it down every night after the sampling so that we wouldn't impede the individuals that went out to fish early in the morning). The first rafts would normally start coming around 8:00pm and we would usually finish around 11:00-12:00am. We would take down part of fence so that the morning shift going out to sea wouldn't be impeded. Then we would walk back up the path to the house, avoiding the occasional penguin out for a nighttime stroll. The penguin colonies were always alive at this time, and we saw many heads and butts poking out of nests, and heard loud greeting calls as the partners greeted each other after a day apart. After a cup of hot soup/tea, it was off to bed, serenaded by the loud squawks and calls of the penguin colony. (see sound clip below) They would quiet down eventually, only to start up again around 4:30AM :P

To close the post, I'll leave you with some pretty shots of Bowen Island: