Fieldwork can be many things, intriguing, challenging, educative, lonely, peaceful, but it is first and foremost an experience unlike any other, and that is especially true when you find yourself in remote islands working on penguins!
In November 2024, I set off for the Falkland Islands for the very first time, islands where I spend three months of the austral summer. I visited two islands, Hummock and Saunders, met a dozen of amazing scientists, encountered more than 20 new species and was surrounded by hundreds of penguins.
But what was I doing there? As part of my PhD I aim to collect data on diet and foraging behaviour on the severely declining southern rockhopper penguin and this can't be done remotely, or not entirely...
During my time on the islands, I deployed GPS and time-depth recorders (TDR) on rockhoppers to study their foraging behaviour, i.e., where do they go, how fast do they swim, or how deep, and for how long... This type of data is incredibly helpful to understand the dynamics of individuals and colonies, detect any change in habitat use over time or between individuals, colonies, species.
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(1) Rockhopper colony with VHF recording station (Hummock Is.)
(2) Rockhopper colony at the Neck (Saunders Is.)
(3) Setting up the VHF station
(4) Placing a camera on Magellanic penguin (Hummock Is.)
(5) Rockhopper colony with one bird equipped with a GPS
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But working with rockhoppers is not the only task I completed during my time in the Falklands. Indeed, in my many adventures I was given the opportunity to help brilliant scientists in their own work on a diverse range of species.
Thanks to them I was involved in the search of breeding Sooty shearwaters, satellite tagging of short-eared owl, GPS tracking of imperial shags, camera deployment on Magellanic penguins and all the little activities one can do on an island, such as beach cleans, biodiversity surveys, behavioural observations amongst others.
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(1) Setting up audiomoth recorder, (2) prion on egg taken via burrowscope, (3) ringed short-eared owl, (4) tagged imperial shag, (5) satellite tag on short-eared owl, (6) rockhopper skull, (7) sooty shearwater from trail camera