This week, although the weather conditions are extremely bad with repetitive snow storms, we continued the check of skuas, cape pigeons and snow petrels during short good weather windows. Many skuas have two eggs, which are green with dark dots. Cape pigeons and snow petrels lay a single white egg, but astonishingly we observed one nest of Cape pigeons with two eggs. Birds are buried in the snow and we observed many abandoned eggs. This year is catastrophic with huge breeding abstention and breeding failures. Last year we equipped some snow petrels and cape pigeons with GLS, and we have been able to find some of them this year. We were very happy to recapture these birds to obtain the GLS data.

We went to the emperor penguins colony to see if there were any dead chicks after the storms. Most of the penguins have left the colony now, in the picture you can see one column leaving the colony.

We did find some dead chicks, with make happy skuas (see picture) and giant petrels (see track in the snow), both of which are scavengers.

We also did the check of southern fulmar. I love those birds because they are very quiet and enchanting when they open wide their beaks and move their heads smoothly like a dancer, without making any noise. The colony is very small in Terre Adelie, the population size fluctuates around 60 individuals. Again this year they are fewer birds and we observed some egg failures due to storm conditions. We retrieved three GLS from last year and we equipped twelve new birds. This will allow linking foraging information to demographic information, in order to better understand the processes by which sea ice affects the demography of the southern fulmar. This is part of a project funded by the Ocean Life Institute of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The chinstrap penguin left and we did not find the egg. We will never know what happened exactly. Chicks of adelie penguin and skuas are hatching, they are very tiny and very cute.

Finally, we had a wonderful Christmas. Each of us gave an anonymous present, which was randomly distributed by Father Christmas. Amazingly Father Christmas traveled from the North to the South Pole! We had a very good French meal, with “Foie gras”, smoke salmon, a “Russian Hole” (i.e. ice cream with vodka in the middle of a huge meal to facilitate the digestion), big piece of good rare beef and potatoes gratin, wonderful cheese selection, and white chocolate ice cream

dessert with of course good French wine and champagne! Then we had a great party with a lot of rock and roll dancing!

Now, the boat is unloading and I’m waiting to leave. The weather conditions are not cooperative and they had to cancel the oceanographic campaign with many scientific programs unfortunately. This reminds us that we don’t control weather conditions and we are in one of the remotest and harsher place in the world. I’m already delayed by 18 days, and it might be even more!