Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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A special edition for gannet-lovers*

One of the things I did while I was in New Zealand recently was to visit the Cape Kidnappers gannet reserve, the largest mainland gannet reserve in the world with 13000 birds**. There are four colonies of the Australasian gannet or takapu in the area, including one where visitors can get very close to the birds, many of which are nurturing chicks at this time of the year.

Gannet colonies are pretty amazing. They assault the senses, with the noise and odour being especially noticeable for the first few minutes after arriving. The birds believe in high-density living, and nest very close to each other, and the chicks were in various stages of development (surprisingly they migrate from the colony before their parents, and although they don’t really have any idea where they are going, after a few years they return to their natal colony to breed). Birds are always taking off and landing from the colony, as they go in search of food which they catch by diving at high speed into the ocean. Incoming birds fly over the colony, but it sometimes takes them two or three passes to manage the landing in the right place. This means that there are plenty of birds soaring overhead … and so plenty of photo opportunities. This, coupled with the fact that the tiny fence separating visitors from the birds is barely a metre from the colony’s edge, means that I took a rather large number of photos (I culled nearly half, but still ended up with nearly 100***).

All in all, it was a trip worth doing: the birds were wonderful and the coastal scenery and nearby countryside were also quite remarkable. A selection of photos (nowhere near 100 🙂 ) can be found here.

* In the famous Monty Python bookshop sketch, the obstreperous customer wants to buy “Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds”, but he wants the expurgated version without the gannet. He doesn’t like gannets since “They’ve got long nasty beaks! And they wet their nests”. The bookshop assistant tells him he can’t expect there to be a special edition for gannet-haters, although the assistant does attempt to make such a special edition by tearing out the offending gannet page.

** It’s always hard to interpret such brags. I have visited Cape St Mary’s gannet colony, in Newfoundland, which claims to have 24000 birds (northern gannets, rather than Australasian), but most of these are on the top of a 100m tall sandstone pillar, some 15-20 metres away from the top of the sea cliffs where visitors observe them, thus making them “non-mainland” … by 15-20 metres horizontally and 100 metres vertically!

*** And I would have taken about 20 photos in Newfoundland, because that was back in the days of expensive slide film.

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