Summer placement; Flamingo Land

I've been a little lax with my updates, I know, but I've been so ridiculously busy with revision and getting distracted by various happy things in my life. A few e-mails have been passed between my supervisor, Julie Hawkins, and my potential summer placement leader, Andrew Marshall. Since funds are very tight this year (probably my own fault with Egypt and my Open Water diving course) I need to stay within York or, at a push, the North-East of England. A fantastic opportunity has popped up to work with Flamingo Land zoo which I'm definitely interested in. I'm going to meet with Andy on Monday after our stats lecture (he also happens to teach us stats using 'R') and get some of the background and what it would entail.

The e-mail states that it is a behavioural study on the Humboldt penguin, a threatened species native to the east coast of South America. A lot of research has been done with Flamingo Land in order to determine the optimal conditions for keeping this species based on behaviour, breeding and veterinary care, of which will soon be in review for publication. A new enclosure has been provided to home a large colony of penguins and represents one of the UK’s largest penguin pools. It provides an excellent opportunity to test the conclusions of the paper, and this is where I come in… I need to gather data on the behaviour and breeding success of the penguins in Flamingo Land and analyse the data together with the CIRCLE researchers (Centre for the Integration of Research, Conservation and Learning).

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) at Boulders Beach, Simon's town, South Africa

This was another fantastic day trip that we did in our week 'holiday' before the field course, we went to see the penguins. A colony of African penguins, also known as Jackass penguins (Spheniscus demersus) settled at Boulders Beach in 1982 and is a popular tourist attraction. Luckily (I say it in a very loose way) it was bucketing it down with rain when we went... I've never been so wet in my life! I didn't even think about it, so here we were walking from the Simon's Town train station to Boulders Beach, in the rain, with our waterproof jackets on, completely forgetting that jeans have to be the absolute worst thing you can wear in these conditions. My blue jeans looked black by the end of it, when we came home we were shivering and I ended up breaking my phone (due to the rain). 

Anyway...

We got on a bus to get to Cape Town train station, it was actually very scary since the bus didn't want to stop for us and so we had to jump on whilst it was still moving, only to sit there being stared at for the whole 20-30 minutes. It was very cheap though so we couldn't complain. Upon arrival at the train station we bought our tickets... Return from Cape Town to Simon's Town... This cost us just 23,50 rand which at the time equated to about £2.30 - pretty good value if you ask me!

We walked, and walked, and walked (and got very wet as mentioned) until we reached Boulders Beach! I didn't realise it was part of the Table Mountain National Park but, there you go... I wish I could tell you an interesting story about each of the penguins, but I'm afraid I don't have any to tell. They all looked very cold and a few of them kept sneezing (which was quite cute, I'll admit). So instead, I'm going to flood the page with some penguin photos, all take by yours truly.

(I do think these two little things are adorable... they huddled together for a long time).

That's all for now! Rachel x