March of the (killer) Penguins

Woefully behind on blog posts and procrastinating madly despite the impending thundercloud of exams. Naturally, instead of studying, I'm updating my useless and increasingly-unenticing blog.

Remember those penguins I promised? Right, well, see, I didn't actually manage to take any photos of penguins, since I was too busy actually chasing after them with various penguin-wrangling paraphernalia. Hachar gave me grief for that, I can tell you. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Over a month ago, and e-mail went out for volunteers to stay a day and night on an island infested with penguins (doesn't that sound like the premise of a B-grade horror? Think "The Day Of The Penguins" *DUH DUH DUH*. Like Hitchcock's The Birds, but with spheniciformes). I leapt at the chance because how often does someone invite you to go and play with penguins, am I right? So I offered myself up as assistant penguin nabber and hoped for the best. The response came quickly, and I was accepted.

At first I had visions of myself traipsing around wild deserted foreshores in deepening twilight with penguins, who, charmed by my irresistable way with animals, surround me adoringly, and crawl into my lap. The whole hair streaming behind me thing was an optional accessory. But after a while doubt crept up on me and I had visions of being stuck in some research facility surrounded by other volunteers, made up of Australia's High School Finest, i.e. giggly blond blowdried clones who wouldn't speak to the dorky Asian chick because everyone knows Asians don't speak English. I could almost hear their flat nasal accents, and imagined that after a prolonged period of time it would drive me to use the nearest penguin to bash my brains out. That was when I started regretting sacrificing myself to Camp Bimbo.

I shared my concerns about going penguin hunting Topher, who told me, "Ah, the penguins are okay, it's those racist giraffes you have to worry about."

Filled with trepidation, I drove myself down to the jetty early in the morning, and was blown away. The island sits barely a kilometer away from the mainland, surrounded by exquisitely clear water, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the Maldives. Peering through the water, I could count the coral stands in the shallow water. At low tide, there's a sandbar that stretches form the mainland to the island. If you don't mind getting wet to the knees, you could literally walk cross to the island. For this kind of beauty, Camp Bimbo would be worth it.

I shouldn't have worried though, since I was the only volunteer there. When I got there, I understood why.

Our job was basically to go to each every penguin nest (comprised of both natural and artificial nest sites), drag out the penguins, weigh them, check their microchips, count eggs, and get shat on by the hordes of seagulls. The researcher was a lovely woman, who, aside from Madonna, has the most toned arms I've seen on a mother of two. She showed me how to open up the nestboxes, grab the penguins and shove them into the sack and check their tags.

The penguins that we were kidnapping are fairy penguins, and they look like this.


Sure, they look harmless and cute, right? Wrong. Cute, sure. Harmless, no. Every single one of them tried to bite me. Most of them managed. And despite the fact that they have no teeth, they're able to break the skin. Once they've latched on to you, you can't exactly smack them to make them let go either, so you just stick your arm out and wait for them to drop off, like ripe fruit from the penguin bush. A couple managed to draw blood, despite the heavy duty gloves we wore.

"Are you all right?" the researcher asked me as I withdrew my hand from one nestbox with a growling penguin attached to my thumb.

"Sure," I said with too much entusiasm as I tried to avoid appearing weak, even as my oxygen-carrying erythrocytes were uselessly expended. I got shat on for good measure too.


Attack of the penguins - death by cute

There was a lot of exercise involved. Thee were points where we were on our bellies and commando-crawled through the brush to get to the nests. I've always thought penguins nested near the shore, but those fairy penguins could scale Everest-style peaks with those little legs of theirs. And my god, penguin chicks are cute, but they're filthy. The smell was indescribable. My jeans were literally covered in penguin muck, like the work of some coprophiliac Jackson Pollock.

At night, we picked up two other people who would join us for the night captures. We built a little fence along where the penguins emerge at dusk, and hid behind it Lying in the sand, you could see the penguins through the mesh, but they couldn't see you. They' emerge from the water, shake themselves, waddle up to the fennce and then stop, confused. They had "Who the hell put THAT there?" written all over their little beaky faces. They'd wander around a bit, confused, and eventually bunch up. Then we'd spring out from behind the fence like maid soffered off-days and herd them into a corral when there were enough of them. Then we'd chuck them into a container, wheel them to where we’d set up a recording station and weight them, measure their beaks, microchip them and let them go. Lying on my side in wet side, stinking to high heaven with the dorkiest bloody headlamp strapped to my forehead giving me a massive headache, I thought happily that this had been a bloody brilliant idea after all.

Of course, I realized that night that I forgotten to bring my trackpants and there was no way I hell I was sleeping in my jeans. So I had to sleep in my knickers. Thank god I didn't choose to bring the Black Sabbath pair.



And this photo was taken the morning that I left, because I woke up at the crack of dawn and me and another research assistant went beachwalking at 6 a.m. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.