Being a seabird biologist, my life is quite varied. Sometimes I’m in the field, working with the birds I’m studying, and other times I’m behind a desk or a lab bench processing all the data I’ve collected. Today I thought I’d give you all a quick insight into what life in the field is like – because that’s definitely the most exciting part of what I do! I think you can all imagine the desk part quite well on your own…
September to May is my field season – this is when most of the species I work on are at their breeding colonies. For the rest of the year, these birds are out at sea and inaccessible to us humans, so we have to work around when they are back on land to breed. Breeding times vary a bit, so my work with Fairy prions is between September-January, whereas rako / Buller’s shearwaters return from migration in September and their chicks only fledge in May.
My day starts when the sun sets. The birds I work with – petrels, shearwaters and prion, are nocturnal over land, which means they only return to their colonies at night. Nights are varied – sometimes thousands of birds return, other nights it’s very quiet if they’ve stayed out at sea on long foraging trips. It can be very impressive watching them swirl over the forest, and then plummet through the canopy, crashing through branches to hit the ground with a solid thud. They’re amazingly accurate, often landing right on top of their burrows.
Depending on the work, I can be up all night. Sometimes we’re catching birds to deploy tracking devices like GPS units, and then we retrieve them after a few days or weeks. Other times we need to take feather and blood samples to check the condition of the birds and see how well they’re doing for the current season. Some of our work is simply sitting and listening – trying to discover burrows and figure out what species are breeding where on the islands we work on. There’s a lot we don’t know about the seabirds of Northern Aotearoa New Zealand – including the population sizes of many species, and where their main breeding colonies actually are.
All-nighters aren’t always required, and sometimes we break up the schedule and work through the most active parts of the night – when the birds return, and when they leave before dawn, napping through the quiet midnight hours. Either way, with dawn comes the end of the shift, and I’ve come to love the feeling of calm that it brings. A lightening sky is like a breath of fresh air, surfacing after a night wrapped in the darkness of the forest. I love relaxing at the end of the night by picking a high vantage point and watching the sun rise, before heading back to my tent to sleep for a while.
We also have work to do during daylight hours! Our time on islands is often limited, so we pack as much as possible into the time we’re there. Sometimes it’s checking burrows in study plots to see how many birds are incubating eggs, or how many chicks have hatched. I often need to process blood samples from the night before for physiological parameters that are time-sensitive, so I have a field-lab set up in our base camp.
Napping is a very important part of nocturnal seabird fieldwork, because working all night is hard, and tired people make mistakes! I often don’t get enough sleep when I’m in the field, but I’m getting very good at sleeping wherever and whenever to make the most of any downtime we have.
Most of the islands are entry by permit only, and we go through strict quarantine with the Department of Conservation to make sure that no invasive species, animal or plant, come with us to the islands. I often get asked about how we live on the islands, and the answer is in tents. There aren’t any facilities on the nature reserve islands that we work on, so we have to set up a camp every time we go out, and dig our own bathroom! We have a base ‘kitchen’ camp, and then individual tents scattered around the landing site. Swimming substitutes in for showers as freshwater is limited. We’re extremely lucky to have some fantastic snorkelling at the Poor Knights Islands where we do a lot of our work throughout the season.
And then it’s rinse, repeat. Trips vary from a few days to a few weeks depending on the work that we’re doing. Every trip is different, and it’s amazing seeing how the life on the island changes throughout the season. At the moment we’re having a short break between trips working with rako on the Poor Knights – we finished our last trip in December and will be out again in February to see how many of the birds we found incubating in December have hatched chicks.
So that’s life in the field! I love it. I’m more at home in a tent in the bush than in a house, and despite the lack of modern-day comforts, the field season is the time of year that I’m happiest. And the dirtiest. I do enjoy my first hot shower when I get back to the mainland!
