Humble Island & the Giant Petrels

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to go out and see Humble Island with the birders. Actually, the birders left Palmer Station a few months ago, but two of our staff have been permitted to go out and weigh the giant petrel chicks on behalf of the birders, and I got to go.


Basically, since the petrel eggs hatched on Humble Island, the birders have tagged a few of the chicks and kept track of their weights over the following months. Because of the science going on Palmer people aren't normally allowed to visit this island, so I was lucky to be invited for this trip.


My job was to stand by and record the results as my comrades gently coaxed a petrel chick into a bag so they could weigh it.


And of course, our seal friends made an appearance as well. Here's a great pic of a fur seal.


And here's another of a leopard seal laying around on the ice just off the pier at Palmer. Note: Leopard seals are mean! That smile is leopard seal for "I'm going to eat you!".

It was a good wildlife day. There's a few other pretty good shots on the album too.

Jeff

Album: http://photos.jeff.braucher.net/20090519HumbleIsland

Fishing

Last Sunday the LMG (a ship, the Lawrence. M Gould) left Palmer Station for its last fishing cruise before going back north to Puenta Arenas. One of the science groups currently working at Palmer is researching a special kind of "whiteblooded" icefish, and a few of us Palmer crew were lucky enough to go along for the ride. We fished 4 days and 3 nights and returned on the 27th.


We got a great view of the backside of Mt. Williams on the way out.


Most of the time we spent "trawling" for fish with big nets that are dragged along the sea floor.


The rest of the time we dropped "pots" to be retrieved later.





It was wonderful to get away from the station for a few days, and we saw some spectacular sites. It'll be sad to see the ship finally leave with our friends in a week.

Jeff

Full Album:
http://photos.jeff.braucher.net/20090529Fishing

Oprah's On

Guess what? Palmer Station is going to be on Oprah this Thursday! That's Thursday, May 21st at whatever time Oprah's on in your area.

Here's the link for the show :
http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow-20090507-skype

The stars from Palmer are our Research Associate, Neal Scheibe (photo in the link above), and one of our scientists, Dr. Bruce Sidell. Depending how they air it you may actually catch a quick glimpse of those of us who were hanging out on the walkway during the recording also (fingers crossed).

We'll actually only be on the show for a few minutes. The point of the show is basically Oprah skypeing people all over the world and we were only one group out of a dozen. But hey I guess that's worth something.

Stay tuned.

Scavenger Hunt

My team got 2nd place in the Palmer Scavenger hunt on Sunday. Yay! Palmer's actually a really cool place for a scavenger hunt since you tend to see the same things everyday. For those of you who don't know how it works, basically each team is given a prop and a collection of thumbnail pictures taken from around the station. This includes things like stickers, graffiti, wall art, etc. Each team has to find the items in the pictures and get a picture on a digital camera holding the prop in front of the item. Some of them were really tough, but it was a lot of fun.

I get a free pint glass from the station store. Sweet.

Wind

I got the last of my boating training this week. The wind was blowing at a calm 5 knots and we had a wonderful time out on the water. Later that day we broke 70 knots! That's about 80 mph winds! It was hard to walk from one building to another. Bottles were clinking together on the shelves. Windy enough for ya?

Boating!

Today was an awesome day. Normally we'd be working on Saturdays (6-day week here), but the Gould comes back from fishing tomorrow, so we got today off instead of Sunday. To our great fortune, the weather cooperated and there was no wind. Time for some boating!


Here's where we're allowed to boat. We started out heading SW down to Cormorant Island, then later after dropping off a few people back at Palmer we headed over to Janus Island.


There's Mt. Williams behind me.


I saw fur seals.





and a few Elephant seals.



and lots of ice...


and birds - cormorants, albatross, and petrels...




and of course PENGUINS!!!






Absolutely beautiful day out. This is why I'm here.


Check out the full album :
http://photos.jeff.braucher.net/20090509Boating

Hope everyone's having a nice summer up north!

Penguin!

Saw my first penguin today! Carrying some equipment up the hill for some late night maintenance and there's this little guy waddling around on his own. Apparently it's an Adelie. He hollered a few times and went on his way. Awesome!

Shredding the Ant-gnar-ctic

It's official. I've shredded the southern continent.

Finally got my first day off today. Too windy for boating, but the temps were in the high 30's so I thought I'd find something else to do outside. Time to drag a board up the hill for some much needed shredding.



From Palmer station you can hike up the glacier about 45 minutes to where the crevasses start.



It's actually a pretty good slope when the snow is good. There's Palmer down at the bottom.



Sweet...




Here it is. Proof! The snow was nice and soft where I could find it, but in between was some pretty awful glacial ice. I managed to carve my way around a lot of it, but every now and then there was no choice but to scrape my way through. Familiar territory for east coasters...





All in all not a bad day out. The wind was definitely blowing strong, but it was a nice warm wind so it really just made it kind of hard to walk. I'm sure the boarding will get a lot better once we start getting some snow. Of course by then there will only be a few hours in the day to get out and do anything.



Check out the full album :
http://photos.jeff.braucher.net/20090503Shredding

Cheers!

GSAR

Big news! I'm officially on the Palmer Station Glacier Search & Rescue team! We got out for our first training day today, but unfortunately the weather (once again) did not cooperate. Despite the winds & temps we probably could've gone out on the glacier anyway, but communication would've been too difficult to really do comprehensive training. Instead we opted to practice prussiking up and down ropes tied off the balcony of the GWR building. It was great fun and just nice to be outside for a while. I'm really looking forward to our next day off (Sunday) so that I can finally drag a snowboard up the hill and shred the Ant-gnar-ctic. More about that later...