Sledding And Fencing

November 18, 2008

Today I helped build a fence around a bunch of penguins. We encircled a small colony of a couple dozen nests with plastic fencing, leaving only one entrance for the birds. As they pass through, a chip implanted in their wing is detected by sensors which record the event, and a scale weighs the birds.

It’s all very high-tech, and lets us see how long the penguins leave their nests to find food, how much food they bring back to their chicks, and which birds are around this year.

Setting up the fence and “weighbridge”, however, was epic. To get the gear down there, it was all strapped onto a sled, and we put on crampons, took up harnesses, and man-hauled it almost a mile down the face of a glacier from our hut to the penguin colony. Once there, it took us six hours of labor to dig out snowdrifts, plug in solar panels, move a penguin nest that was in the way of the fence, and hook up the weighbridge apparatus.

Meanwhile, my toes were slowly freezing in my boots (the temperature today with wind chill was -39 degrees C), and they were painful to the point of nausea by the time we hiked back up the hill. I was glad for the pain, since it meant I wasn’t getting frostbite yet. Working in the antarctic chill is a singularly cold experience, but I need to figure out the best combination of socks and boots. In any case, a hot and spicy pasta dinner at the end of the day was well-deserved by all.