Written on January 20, 2026 by Chloe Rabinowitz; edited by Kalyna Durbak
Our field work crew has been here for a while! Sofia Denkovski, Anna Testorf, and Chloe Rabinowitz arrived in Punta Tombo on January 6th, followed by Dr. Dee Boersma on the 12th. We have been getting well acquainted with all our active research nests and have been progressing steadily with putting out late chick tags. As of January 20 we have 21 Axytreks in use, with 4 of those being in a newer research area we call “South Colony.” We’ve deployed the tags on an even split of males and females (10 females, 11 males). So far we’ve retrieved 2; screenshots of their trips are provided below.
Almost all our RFID study chicks have RFIDs now, and hopefully we’ll get the last of them done in the next few days. Scales are out and seem to be working well.
Our goal for the next two years is to toe-tag 2,000 random chicks, so we’re trying to spend time every day toe-tagging. Toe-tagging chicks allows us to follow known-aged birds, which is critical to our research. Reliably knowing the age of the penguins we study allows us to ask questions such as how penguins of different ages alter their behaviors due to climate change (Johansson et al. 2024), or how mate retention and divorce rates differ with age and experience (Wagner et al. 2022). Wish us luck in our toe-tagging efforts!
It’s been super hot and dry this season. And windy! So, so windy…
