Back to it

Leila, a friend from university, was accepted onto the research project for this season and flew into Christchurch on 1st April. I took the bus down to meet her and spend the night in Christchurch. By the time she had arrived and we checked in to the hostel it was early evening, we walked out, through the Botanic Garden, to a shopping mall so I could buy a new pair of shoes then we found a nice little restaurant and had a great curry. The long flight had started to take its toll by then and Leila was pretty tired so we headed back to the hostel for a fairly early night. The following morning after checking out we had a quick peek in the cathedral and then bought tickets to take the gondola up above the city. The weather was good, though there was some cloud hanging over the city, and we enjoyed the views, took a stroll along the top of the hill and had some lunch. We stayed up there until it was time for us to head back to the city and catch the bus to Kaikoura. Leila seems to have settled in to the volunteer house and Kaikoura pretty quickly.

Leila and me on top of the hill by the gondola

I guess I haven’t fully explained the project or how it works. The project is funded, at least partially, by the DOC (NZ Department of Conservation) and was set up by Wendy and Tim Markowtiz and Christoph Richter from NZ and Jonathan Gordon from the University of St Andrews. The overall aim of the project is to assess the impact of the tourist vessels (boats, planes and helicopters) on the sperm whales that use the Kaikoura canyon. This will be done by collecting data from the research boat, and also from land as a control so we have no impact on the whales. There are three PhD candidates involved: Saana (St Andrews Uni) was here for the first field season to collect some acoustic data and has now returned to Scotland to continue working on her thesis. Manuel (Canterbury Uni) will be here for the next few year s to collect data for his PhD and is primarily in charge of data collection from the boat. Ophélie (Canterbury Uni) arrived here sometime in March and will largely be collecting data from the land base. Manuel is not on a fully funded PhD so he needs to earn some money for day to day living. This means he has taken an MMO (marine mammal observer) job in Kenya for about two months. Unfortunately this means that the boat will probably not be going out whilst he is away. I have asked if I can organise to take the boat out as I know how it all runs but I’m not sure whether this will happen. Christoph, one of the project organisers should be coming out sometime in May and the should hopefully be going out when he is here.

Manuel arranged a meeting on the 5th for the new volunteers to go through some of the protocols and so he could meet people before he left for Kenya. On the 8th Leila, Daniel (another new volunteer) and I went up to the land base with Ophélie to be shown the land work. This involves scanning for whales using binoculars and recording surfacings with a theodolite and a video camera as well as inputting data into a program called Logger similar to the work we do on the boat. The weather was pretty good so we had a nice day on the end of the peninsula and saw Kaikoura regular Tiaki surface a few times. Hopefully there will be enough reasonable weather days to keep us occupied with work, and we will continue to go out and collect additional data from the Whale Watch boats whenever we can.

That’s all for now, more updates as things progress.