Bagging Chickens (part 1 of 2)
Friday 6th Nov 99

One of the science projects at Mawson is the Adelie penguin Monitoring program. There are hundreds of Adelie penguin rookeries along the Antarctic coast. Just in the vicinity of Mawson, there are about 10,000 penguins during the breeding season. Across the harbour from Mawson are a large number of islands - two of which are Verner Island and Welch island.

At Verner Island there is a special penguin monitoring program where a fence has been placed around small colony of penguins. At one spot in the fence is an opening with a weighbridge. As the penguins walk across the weighbridge they are automatically weighed and if they have a tag on them that tag is recorded. The APMS (Automated Penguin Monitoring system) is a sophisticated system designed by the Marine Science part of the Australian Antarctic Division. It records all the weights and times the penguins cross the bridge and can send them direct via the Internet back to Kingston.

I have been helping the biologists maintain the APMS while it is running over summer, and as part of this "maintenance" I went out to Verner Island to check the APMS batteries. I don't have any photos of the APMS systems yet - but above there is a picture of one of the the colonies on Verner Island.

To make sure that the APMS system is measuring the birds accurately, the biologists like to have a control group that is weighed manually. This involves catching the penguins and weighing and sexing them. After I went to Verner Island, I went on with the penguin biologist, Lyn, and an Antdiv photographer ,Wayne, to Welch island where we spent about 4 hours weighing about 50 Adelie penguins.

There are a number of steps to the art of weighing the Chicken. (note : The penguins are commonly referred to by the bio's as "chickens").

Catching the "Chicken" involves the selection of a victim, walking closely up to it from three sides and catching it with a net on the end of a pole. While this might sound easy - it is very difficult because chickens can often flop
down on their bellies and motor off at high speed (ie fast running speed for us) and if they do this then you have to be prepared to run very fast for at least 40m then dive to catch the bird without crushing it! (especially if you have
crampons on your boots. Crampons are spikes attached to the boots to gain grip on the sea ice). Here is Lyn & Wayne about to successfully "bag a chicken".

Bagging the chicken When you initially grab the penguin, it often flaps and squawks quite loudly, but it can be made to be very quiet by grabbing it's feet and clutching it to hold the flippers still. Then we put a small hood over it's eyes which calms the bird down even further. It is then put into a larger bag and weighed with some scales. Hopefully the chicken doesn't wriggle so that the reading is accurate!

Weighing a Chicken The birds weighs range from 3.5kg to 7kg. They don't vary much between the male & females. The male sits on the nest for at least 2-4 weeks while the female feeds. During this time the male can loose quite a lot of weight.

The bio's also want to know the sex of each bird. It is very difficult to tell the sex of an Adelie penguin by looking at it, so more "accurate" techniques must be used, and to do this Lyn has to do an examination of the birds genitalia.

Email continues in part 2