Taking the shovel for a walk

I’m currently sitting in an orange UFO. 

A quarter of an hour ago I was exposed to the elements, taking the shovel for a walk. That’s Macca speak for ‘had a poo’.

At Brothers Point Hut this involves walking down the steep little track through the tussocks dodging elephant seals, making your way to the surf, digging a hole in the coarse grey sand, and baring your bottom. It’s a disconcerting process for those of us who choose the discretion of darkness, which brings with it visions of being charged by an invisible elephant seal in mid squat.

Brothers Point Hut has been my home for the past couple of days. I’m here with Gary and Dana, a dog handler/hunter duo. They’re here to bust bunnies. The island’s been divided into six hunting blocks, with teams of two working each one. I’ve been filming quite a bit with Gary, he’s had his eye on a rabbit that he spotted a couple of weeks ago. With the help of his two trusty dogs, Tama and Joker, he nabbed it today. Well, they actually kind of got two, but one was technically already dead.

Pete’s at the hut too, for tonight. He’s headed further south tomorrow. His job is downloading GPS points from the rest of the Macquarie Island Pest Eradication Project team, and act as a roving hunter.  He’ll be walking around the island every fortnight.

It’s been a full-on couple of weeks, and today is the first time I’ve been able to take half an hour out and just sit quietly by myself and contemplate. Well, nervously quiet anyway, because the giant petrels kept swooping over top of me to see if I was dead yet. The skuas are worse apparently, if you’re injured they will land on you and peck out your eyes (AAD issues you with goggles, partly for this reason).  There was a guy who broke his leg on North Head once, but by the time the rescue team reached him the skuas had supped on a good part of his limb.

I digress.

Macca is awesome. We spent the first week at station, getting initiated to island life. There are 34 people on the island at the moment, but in the first week there were a few extras, temporarily left behind when the Aurora Australis (the icebreaker we came down on) headed south to save the Janice, a fishing boat hunting Patagonian toothfish, which had broken down.

We hardly had time to take notice all the goings-on though. We had the first day off, but it was information overload. Pete and I spent the morning getting reacquainted up in the hamshack (which is our humble little abode when we’re both on station), and the rest of the day I walked around in a daze. It was all so surreal. The helicopters going back and forth, people zipping around station in little vehicles, huge elephant seals fighting each other in the middle of the track, gentoo penguins cruising around on the west beach. Then there’s the food. Lots of it, several times a day. It seems like we ate a main meal every two hours or so.

Then the training began – which I had to be part of at the same time as filming. My favourite was the orientation up Doctors Track, it had snowed overnight and the land looked like it had had a thick white blanket draped over it. It was a bit of a grunt up the hill, trying to keep up with my camera, especially with Bree (the super fir wildlife ranger) at the helm.

The people on station are all nice, but I’ve been hanging out mostly with the MIPEP crew.  Most of the hunters and dog handlers are around my age, well-traveled, grounded sort of folk. We’ve already had a few dramas, with breakups, breakdowns, and hangovers due to creme de menthe aka ‘green death’ (a lethal drink with an extremely high percentage of alcohol). But on the whole everyone’s happy, and keen to get stuck into 9 months of hunting bunnies. And I’ll be chasing after them with my wee camera. I’ve had three days of it now, and haven’t broken down yet.