March in Kaikoura - The Shearwater Project

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March 25th 2008

Published: March 25th 2008

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Feeding time

mmm... sardines

It's been a while again since my last entry. I've been busy these past few weeks volunteering for the Department of Conservation. I've been involved in an attempt to establish a new breeding colony of the rare Hutton's Shearwater on the Kaikoura peninsula. This is something I heard about and decided I wanted to do before I got here.
Shearwater chicks were brought down from the two alpine colonies in the Kaikoura range and housed in little burrows before they fledge and leave for the open sea. The idea is that they will use the same spot when they return to breed four years later, thus establishing a third breeding colony. Whether or not it will work won't be known until next year, or two years time when the first birds return from the Australian coast, where they spend their early years feeding.
So this has been taking up most of my free mornings over the past few weeks. The daily work involves taking each chick from its burrow, measuring its weight and wing length to see how fast it is growing, and force-feeding it anything from 30-100mls of a paste made from tinned sardines and water before returning it to

The colony

The new colony of 100 nest boxes, situated on the peninsula clifftops.

its burrow. The brew takes nearly an hour to mix every morning, and smells really bad.
It turns out I'm quite good at the feeding process (it's just like handling chickens), so most of the time I've been stationed at one of the two benches whilst other volunteers run to the burrows and fetch the birds. It's fun work, but it's hard not to get covered in filth when the birds decide to regurgitate all over the bench and then shake it everywhere. My hands are also covered in cuts from those sharp hooked beaks. More interesting scars to take home!

The rest of my time here has been mostly taken up by work at the house, where amongst other things I have been helping to build a japanese-style garden, and working three nights a week waiting tables at The Pier. It's getting colder now, and the tourist season is ending here, but we still have three or four days of sunshine every week.
It's a very different lifestyle I'm living here. We hardly need to shop at all - most of what we eat is grown in the garden, or caught from the sea. Max and I have

A helicopter arrives

The chicks were carried down from the mountain colony by helicopter.

been out fishing in the bay a few times when the sea is calm, and there seems to be an endless supply of eels in our stream.
I'm much happier living in Kaikoura than I was at start of the year, and I've now decided that I will stay in New Zealand until July, and will definitely keep travelling until November when my Australian visa runs out (I'm in Christchurch today and have just postponed my return flight so there's no going back!). Nonetheless, I still miss my friends at home very much, and I hope you're all still reading this.

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