Category: Birds

This video from 6 February shows the 15-day-old chick and how it feeds. The adult bird may have travelled a great distance to bring back the semi-digested crustacean soup that it is regurgitating for the chick. I can’t tell one parent bird from the other, and because the system can only cope with 4 hours of recording per day we can’t be sure of adult comings and goings. The chick is being left alone for up to 3 days at the moment, but sometimes an adult bird arrives every night. They are thought to swap between catching quick feeds locally and flying to the polar front on a long expedition for presumably better-quality food. Note the mites on the adult bird. When the chick is alone it is vulnerable to predation by weka. I don’t know if weka can fit in this burrow and it’s fair to say we haven’t seen any evidence of weka getting a chick on the colony in 12 years.

For several years, I’ve been trying to record what happens underground during breeding season. The chosen burrow has either been inactive, the egg failed to hatch, or the camera filled with water. This year I’m optimistic: after a false start with one study burrow, when the sooties did not show up and a moulting penguin did, Burrow 8B is active and I’ve got a camera suspended at the side of the nesting chamber, about 300 mm underground and at the end of the metre-long access tunnel.

I missed egg-laying, but recorded hatching. This video shows the 5-day-old chick on the night of 27 January. If the chick survives to fledge in May and the camera goes the distance, I’ll be able to compile a video showing most of the season.

The IR lights have a faint red glow (850 nm) and the birds pay the camera no attention, except when it turns on for each session and makes a quiet whirring noise. They sometimes seem to notice that but within a second or two they are back to whatever they were doing. The chick is very quiet- turn up the sound to hear it, but not when the adult is calling at the start of the video!