Sunday 9th October 2022

penguins playing in the snow

​Hello friends and family
This week was dominated by an unseasonal cold snap. It started on Wednesday when it was my turn at the Toptip. I was well rugged up for the cold and the quiet was disturbed when the sun came out mid-morning and so too did the families stuck inside with their children for the school holidays. Overnight the snow came in on a strong southerly and stuck to the south faces of everything. It lingered for all of Thursday but had gone by Friday morning.    

many spring blooms got frozen

​The other feature of the week was us stepping up to using the new penguin app in the field. We have now transitioned to using it in the field for data entry on the phone. It works best offline because the phone reception can be patchy and who has time to wait for buffering? 

Dan checking Robbie's screen from my phone

​The penguins have settled down to incubating their eggs. We focused our search where we had missing pairs but found no more nests. We have 25 here, 14 at the Moeraki colony, and 3 at the Bluffs. 

hopefully, death to mosquitoes

​The cold weather gave me a good incentive to get inside jobs done so I did the GST return and found that many of our Penguin Rescue members had renewed their memberships so thank you for that. 

Shag babies hatched in the snow

On Friday our delivery of potting mix arrived. I can now carry on with the potting up of tree seedlings without constantly running out of soil. I am having to shuffle them on outside as the hothouse is needed for the next batch.
Have a great week!
Rosalie