The Kerguelen Islands are among the most remote islands on the planet, lying in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean about 7300 km west of New Zealand (or 17,000 km east if you prefer). Yet they have at least two unlikely connections with New Zealand – a plant and a dolphin. And both are… Read more »
Posts written by Colin Miskelly
The mysterious attraction of the Hutt River to crabeater seals
In late March 2015, a crabeater seal swam up the Hutt River (which flows into Wellington Harbour) and died. It was a remarkable occurrence – the crabeater seal is an Antarctic species rarely recorded in New Zealand – but no-one realised at the time that this was precisely the place in New Zealand where a… Read more »
9000 images on New Zealand Birds Online
The Te Papa-hosted website New Zealand Birds Online has reached another milestone, with the 9000th image loaded on 12 January. It is only 10 months since we celebrated the 8000th image, showing that images continue to be loaded at a rate of about 100 per month. At the time of the launch in June 2013,… Read more »
A glimpse of ancient Mauritius: Ile aux Aigrettes, restoration island
I first heard of Ile aux Aigrettes at a conference on island pest eradications held in Auckland in early 2001. A delegate from Mauritius spoke about a failed attempt to eradicate Indian musk shrews from the 25 ha island, which had already been cleared of feral cats and ship rats. The island next registered in… Read more »
Once were dodos
The dodo is the world’s most famous extinct bird. Its quirky appearance makes it instantly recognisable in popular culture, including in classics such as Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and the animated short film ‘Ice Age’. One of the reasons it is so well known is that it is considered to be the first… Read more »
Deep science
Our return voyage on the Marion Dufresne was very different from the voyage south. The first voyage was for logistics resupply, and delivery (and uplift) of personnel, plus we had twelve fare-paying tourists on board. The voyage back was an oceanographic survey voyage. There were a similar number of passengers on board (47), but more… Read more »
Kerguelen freeganism
One of the delights for a kiwi naturalist visiting the French subantarctic is enjoying French cuisine. Each of the five cabanes (field huts) we stayed in had been provisioned in advance by helicopter or boat, and on our arrival we would find a cluster of brown or blue plastic barrels (‘touques’) filled with fascinating ingredients… Read more »
The petrels of Ile aux Cochons, Iles Kerguelen
The purpose of our visit to Ile aux Cochons* was to undertake a pilot study of the foraging ecology and at-sea distribution of South Georgian diving petrels (’jojos’) to compare with the closely related (and similar-looking) common diving petrels (’plon plons’) that we had studied on Ile Mayes the previous week. The two islands are… Read more »
A week on Ile aux Cochons, Iles Kerguelen
I have yet to find an explanation for why this gem of an island is called ‘Ile aux Cochons’*. The nearest beasts to hogs that are on the island are the fat slugs of juvenile elephant seals that lie snorting and belching along the shoreline, and there is no evidence that pigs were ever there…. Read more »
The petrels of Ile Mayes, Iles Kerguelen
Isles Kerguelen harbour an astonishing diversity and abundance of seabirds, with 33 breeding species. We had seen breeding colonies of several of the larger species on Grand Terre, but Mayes provided a taste of what the islands would have been like before their discovery – and the introduction of cats, rats and rabbits in particular…. Read more »