Julia Rinck who I met in Germany last year came to visit our lab for four months. I picked her up in Christchurch and on the way back we visited the Baby Blue penguin colony in Oamaru. It was quite late before they came ashore and we weren’t allowed very close, so unfortunately the photos are barely visible.
A week later we headed to the top of Mount Cargill to see the city, but in typical Dunedin style a cloud came through and blocked the view 🙁
Continuing my trend of writing blog posts totally out of sync, here are some photos from a recent trip to the Otago Peninsula. I acted as tour guide for visiting student Meghan Dunn during her visit here. My previous attempts to find penguins for tourists has always failed. I usually the find the pesky little birds when I least expect it, but never when I’m trying to! So to avoid that frustration we headed to Penguin Place, a little sanctuary about 30 mins drive from my place.
Penguin Place is on a small piece of land on the coast. If you zoom in, you can see the constructions in the sand hills designed for tourists to watch the birds.
The birds aren’t caged, they’re allowed to come and go as they please, but are provided with warm, man made shelters which they seem to quite like living in. Before heading down to the main Yellow Eyed penguin area, we stopped to see some Baby Blue penguins which also lived there, you can see one sitting in it’s little hut in the photo below.
We watched the birds surfing in on the waves after a hard days work catching fish. This little dude took his time and sat out in the waves enjoying the scenery for a while.
But he eventually waddled his way out of the surf …
and then met up with his little buddy who waddled back over the sandhill with him …
but his friend treated it as a race …
So he decided to lean back and have a stretch instead. All that fishing must have taken it’s toll!
He even posed for me 🙂
Our uber awesome, wonderful and truly incredible professional ice hockey coach Jenel Bode is leaving 🙁 Hopefully she’ll be back next year though 🙂
Rhyan McMillan and our uber awesome coach Jenel Bode
For her goodbye bash, she organised a goodbye party in a cave at Longbeach. It sounded boring, getting stuck in a cave all evening on a cold, wet, rainy day 🙁 Luckilly Sarah was heading out to take Jane so I hitched a ride along so I could make an appearance and bail home early with Sarah. Darn glad I went though, coz it was totally awesome. The cave was wicked, the fire kept us all cosy warm, everyone had fun and there was loads of entertainment provided by my teammates who provided firebreathing, guitar and flame throwing demonstrations for us all. There were even baby blue penguins in the back of the cave hanging out with us!
Neil Dudley and Rob Owens demonstrating how much effort it takes to burn human skin (more…)
