Sunday 13 November 2011

Last six days in the field

Ele seal bull

Rockhopper penguin

Green Gorge from the porch

Royal penguin colony at Rockhopper Bay

Weaner-baby

Skua near Gratitude Shelter

Weaner mud bathing

Weaners sunning themselves in Sandell Bay

Macquarie Island cabbage - used to be eaten by sealers against scurvy, more recently decimated by rabbits

Sunbathing with weaner

Can I keep him, pleeeaaaaasssssse....

Hmmm, if he gets this big, maybe not...

Me with ele seal skull

Saturday 12 November 2011

Field cuisine


When it comes to cooking in the field, Macca is steeped in tradition.

1.     The Albatross Cookbook. This is a collection of tried and true Macca recipes, put together by some very clever albatross researchers. Polenta, spam, halva, quinoa, they tell you how to render all these things edible.

2.     Sunday morning pancakes. Without fail.

3.     Fray Bentos. This is a steak and kidney pie-in-a-tin. The carnivores among us get addicted - it’s the only thing in the field that actually does resemble meat.

What’s more, Macca huts are stocked with copious amounts of food - bottled, canned, dehydrated, vacuum packed, salted, sugared, pickled. Much of it can be consumed straight out of the packet, but Macca-ites generally opt for a little more gastronomic creativity.

Take Pete K. Turns out he’s quite the chef. This week he treated Sandy, Ben H, Pete P and Claud to a feast at Green Gorge. Using chops he’d carried out from station, he whipped up a monumental curry accompanied by well-kneaded roti. This was washed down with a choice of teas – green, earl grey, English breakfast, Darjeeling, rosehip and chamomile. Ben H did the dishes, which deserves an honourable mention because there were many.

In Tiobunga Hut on the foggy murk of the plateau, Gary had also thawed out chops. He opted to keep these whole and grill them in a tomato and prune jus, accompanied by tiny taters and a little red wine. Tama and Joker enjoyed a feast of bones the next day.

Further south at Windy Ridge Hut, Dean and Pete P went all vego, dabbling with nutmeat, BBQ sauce, dehy onions, egg powder and spices to produce the most delish non-meat burger patties ever. Claud found that her famous potatoats are just as good when made with dehy potato flakes, and baked a mighty fine pull-apart Parmesan and oregano bread for lunch the next day.
With all that foody goodness, it’s just as well that you burn off the excess calories walking back to station.

Danny our chef on station... so delicious but so very very bad for the waistline
Me with the coveted Fray Bentos at Bauer Bay Hut

Pete K is making roti at Green Gorge Hut


Green Gorge Hut - Ben is doing the dishes after an amazing curry by Pete K
After all that cooking the gas bottles need changing


Pete sipping a hot instant soup at Gratitude Shelter, which has only very basic cooking facilities

Tony prefers eating food colouring




Monday 17 October 2011

Macca field huts


I love life in the field. There’s nothing more wonderful than staying in a hut away from it all – especially when you look out the window and see a magnificent beach smothered in penguins and elephant seals.

There’s a variety of huts on Macca, spaced strategically around the island. The permanent Antarctic Division huts – 5 in total – are used not just by researchers and Parks and Wildlife staff, but also by station staff going out on jollies (the Antarctic way of saying ‘holiday’).

The two googie huts (one at Brothers Point and the other at Waterfall Bay) look like orange UFOs. Like all Macca huts they have a wooden cold porch attached (the cold porch is where boots, jackets, packs and surplus food are stored).

The West Coast only has one permanent hut (at Bauer Bay), there’s another at the southern tip of the island at Hurd Point next to a MASSIVE royal penguin colony.

My favourite hut of all though is the one at Green Gorge, about halfway down the eastern side of the island. It’s tucked in under a cliff at the southern end of a cobble beach. The beach is bisected by a pretty stream, and currently home to a large elephant seal harem and a growing colony of king penguins with their maturing chicks. The giant petrels and skuas are also back in large numbers, always looking for a feed of ele seal placenta or sick/dying pups and chicks. On the cliffs the sooty albatross are starting to nest.

There are a couple of outbuildings alongside Green Gorge hut. One is a toolshed and the other is called the Shangri-La. It’s a big food store, and the little sheltered porch outside of it has been modified into a bathing/showering space. A few months ago Pete constructed a bucket shower with little holes in one side of the lid. You fill the bucket with warm water, hoist it to the ceiling with a rope, and hey presto – a luxurious spray of warm water under which you can soap up and wash your hair. You need to be quick though, because the air temperatures are still a little nippy.

The other type of hut currently on Macca is the water tank hut – there’s 5 of those. They’ve been brought in especially for the Macquarie Island Pest Eradication Project.

As their name suggests, the huts are modified water tanks that have received some serious interior decoration. Their small size makes them ‘cosy’ inside, and although there are four bunks, they’re really only suitable for two people…. though it depends who you’re sharing the hut with. I stayed for three nights with Dean and Nancye in Tiobunga Hut last week and it was just fine. We left the door slightly ajar at night to stop the condensation, and this made sleeping on the top bunk much more comfortable (when the door is shut the walls weep). It still felt slightly claustrophobic (the ceiling is about 30 cm from your face), but the fine company made it all worth it.

Each watertank hut has a small cold porch, built out of the pods in which the bait and other supplies were transported for the rabbit eradication project.

Three of the huts are located on the plateau – including Tio - which is very often shrouded in mist. The big issue with the plateau huts is that there is no handy beach on which you can do your business in the morning. Instead you poop into a bag suspended on a makeshift toilet consisting of a stand and a toilet seat, then tuck the bag and its contents into a plastic poo jar that you empty at the beach when you get there. There is an art of pooing into a bag, such as adequately lining it with talcum powder first (I will now forever associate the smell of talcum powder with excrement). You also want to make sure there is no air left in the bag, because the bag might pop when you’re trying to squeeze it into the poo jar. Dana called this whole practice ‘degrading’, and Tony another one of the hunters can make himself hold his waste for up to three days at a time.

The other two water tank huts are located on the coast. The one at Davis Point on the West Coast is the most beautifully-located I reckon. It has sweeping coastline on both sides, a large lawn-like area in behind it and steep mountain-like hills rising up beyond that.

The other water tank is at Caroline Cove west of Hurd Point hut in the south. The area has a bit of an aura or taboo associated with it, because it has permanent restricted access (though I and the rest of the MIPEP team can access it  for operational purposes). Caroline Cove is home to some pretty rare birds, including a small number of nesting wandering albatross. There’s a large natural amphitheatre, which houses a royal penguin colony (they hop their way along a steep creek halfway up a mountain to get there). Below the hut is a sheltered cove that’s home to gentoo penguins and more ele seals. It’s the furthest hut from station, and feels like a lost world. It’s great. Danny and I spent two days there, filming. My highlight was finding a tiny snail, no larger than 2 mm in diameter. That’s as big as that particular species gets apparently.

And that’s all I have to say about Macca field huts at the moment. 

Green Gorge hut with Melissa and Peter

Gary, Tama and Joker at Waterfall Bay hut

The location of Caroline Cove hut


Inside Green Gorge hut

Inside Tiobunga aka Tio hut, a water tank hut

Tio hut sits on the plateau

Saturday 17 September 2011

Bauer Bay - three days of sunshine and blizzards

Rock off North Head

Rabbit damaged hill

West Coast heading towards Bauer Bay

Rabbit damage

Remains of the enemy

Looking out of Eagle Cave

Ele seal 

Ele seal bull

Mel and Wags on the featherbed

Gary and Mel rendez-vous at Aurora Cave

Wags with megasize bone

Gentoos

Evening light on the featherbed

Awesome acommodation

Ele seal skeleton

Ele seal tracks

After the rain

Bauer Bay hut

Me with my favourite skeleton

Sunday 11 September 2011

Meet 'Mountain Woman' Williams

Last week I spent three days filming with the lovely Nancye W.
It turns out that Nancye could give Bear Grylls a run for his money any day of the week. “See that mountain?” she asked me as we stood on the misty plateau. ‘Yes…?” was all I could manage  (as I was still recovering from having just sidled up the steep grassy jump-up out of Waterfall Bay). “Well, that’s where we’re going,” she informed me cheerily.
Like the other six MIPEP team dog handlers, Nancye spends 28 days out hunting one of the six blocks that Macquarie Island has been divided into.  This month she’s working the fourth block down.  When I caught up with her, she and her hunting partner Tony were based out of Waterfall Bay hut, a googie hut that resembles an orange UFO.
The team is working the block systematically. While Tony walks on a north-south axis, Nancye and her two dogs Finn and Katie work from east to west, usually two sweeps a day.
For the purposes of filming, Nancye relaxed her routine slightly – the moonscape-like plateau can get a little monotonous on camera after a while. So on the second day, after a morning of climbing mountains, we veered north to walk around Earnslaw Lake (a large tarn), where Nancye’s favourite dog Katie promptly decided to go for a swim.  The return trip via the escarpment took longer than expected, and by the end of the day we realized we’d walked for nine hours.
That’s why it was such a nice surprise when Tony had a platter of hors d’oeuvres waiting for us back at the hut on our return. Cheese, ham from a tin, smoked mussels (also a la tin), pickled onions and crackers were devoured with such enthusiasm that noone had room for dinner.
The third day was equally eventful. We spent the morning on the plateau again, and yes climbed another mountain (the top of which was so windy that my beanie blew off my head… amazingly I found it again, thanks to its hot shade of neon orange). We dropped down the escarpment for lunch, and located a cosy nook in the tussock overlooking Lusitania Bay. The beach was packed with hundreds of raucous king penguins and chicks. Further out at sea the elephant and leopard seals were hunting penguins and giant petrels floating on the water. Unfortunately you can’t sit and watch the natural dramas for long, because the cold starts turning your cheeks and lips into funny shades of purply-blue.
So we continued north along the coast, where we came across nesting giant petrels, a sleepy leopard seal, king penguins and huge elephant seal bulls. The coastal areas need to be searched for rabbits just as intensively as any other area, but Nancye is very conscientious about disturbing the wildlife as little as possible, bringing her voice down to a whisper at times.
Tony once again had a platter waiting for us on our return, and was stirring a delicious-smelling stew prepared with the last of the beef that the pair had carried out from station. For dessert Nancye served up some of her delicious home-made slice. Even the dogs feasted that night, their dinner supplemented with a stew made from beef trimmings and out-of-date canned vegetables.
I had a new spring in my step when we parted ways the next day, thanks in part to Nancye and Tony’s fine hospitality, as well as their amazing attitude towards their work.  Thanks guys, you’re an inspiration.


Nancye and Gary stop for lunch

Nancye and Tony overlooking Lusi Bay

Overlooking Waterfall Bay

Quiet time before lights out

West Coast

On the plateau