Cape Crozier

We have functional wireless at last! After much fussing, and thanks to Grant's hacking abilities, we were finally able to make our wireless internet link work. Grant Ballard, Vijay Patil, and I arrived at Cape Crozier on November 15th, 2005. For the past month we have been spending endelss hours searching for banded penguins in a colony of 250,000 birds. As of today, we have resighted 560 banded known-age Adelie penguins (i.e. banded as chicks), 288 of which have active nests. Most of them were banded at Cape Crozier, though a few came from other colonies from the other side of Ross Island. The first chicks started hatching late last week. Amelie Lescroel joined us yesterday and will be staying with us through the rest of the season, until late January. It's very late at night and there is too much to write, so I will start with a few photos from our flight to Cape Crozier on November 15th.















Flying along the southern edge of Ross Island. Ice covered mountains and the Ross Ice Shelf in the distance















View of Cape Crozier from the helicopter. The red arrow indicates the location of our hut. The colony stretches for 4 km along the shoreline. The iceberg B15-J is on the left side, separated from the Ross Ice Shelf by a channel filled with pack ice and small leads of open water.

Our home!