I didn’t manage to do a great job of blogging while on the Antipodes. I hoped to, but too many competing interests were bubbling around at the time, and my main drive was to be outside and photograph as much as possible in the time I had there. Which I think is fair enough! Now I’m back and coming out the end of the field season, a little exhausted, and ready to delve into the big library of images that are waiting for me. I’ve made a gallery here, if you’d like a peek: Antipodes 2024.

Later in the trip, in late February, we were undertaking census blocks, counting all the Antipodean albatrosses that we could find. It was long days of walking, scribbling in notebooks, GPS marking nests, startling subantarctic snipe, and calling up and down our grid lines to each other to stay orientated in the mist. So, so much mist. Some of the last work we did was down the south end of the island, and involved taking tents to overnight instead of walking a 4ish hour commute every day.

From the hut on the Antipodes you hear seabirds and snipe all night long – wailing, chattering, pipping, shrieking calls in the darkness. From a tent, the sounds are so much closer, overhead and beside you. On a rare still night, we could even hear the wingbeats of white-headed petrels, grey petrels, and white-chinned petrels swooping overhead, working in the still air to circle and drop down to their burrows. I took some scratchy recordings on my phone, one of which you can enjoy here:

I also took my tripod to the southern end of the island, hoping for stars. It was a forlorn hope, as the usual mist lowered and wrapped us in a soft blanket every night we stayed there. So instead of the Milky Way, you get a photo of home: a cozy orange dome in the dark, and the mist. A chorus of petrel calls a snipe chimes. Ours the only light for miles.

The southern end work was also the end of our trip, as we had to leave the island a few days early to beat some gnarly weather coming from the west. I treasured that time, and wished (as always) that we could have stayed longer.