In the UK you know spring has sprung because the crocuses are pushing through and the daffodils are blooming. Here in South G we don’t have such beautiful plants so the official start to spring is when the ellies come back and start having pups. Besides the ellies there is a lot more birdlife and the furries are also slowly coming to the shore. After the FPV cast off her lines to take Ali, Katie and Matt to the Bay of Islands for a Albatross survey Tommy and I headed for the hills. It was a stunning day – absolutely beautiful and really hot. We climbed onto Brown Mountain having to relearn what it is like walking on scree. On the back side we had an amazing bum slide down it was so good we climbed back up the slope for another go at it. The snow won’t last much longer in these temperatures.

We had lunch and penguin river and saw that 3 of the 6 chicks had survived the winter. The colony has grown to around 20 adults.

The beachmasters have created harems all along the coast. The largest one we saw had 75 females most with pups.

Katie counted 154 pups along the beach yesterday. We saw that two had died and weren’t fortunate enough to see any births.

We came across a very sad sight – a pup had lost its mother and was so hungry that she/he was suckling on a rock.

We sat and watched for a while and I sat quite close. Next you know the pup decides that my bottom is a good place to get some milk from. It slobbered all over my trousers desperate for some milk and sucked pretty hard. I was heartbroken as even though this is nature it is terrible to think about the poor little pup dying of hunger.