Polar South

Adventures in the Antarctic by Terri Nelson

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Grant Winners from the Past

Interested in trying for the grant that got me to the Antarctic?  You can take a look at the list of people and their projects that have been awarded this grant previously by clicking the link above.  There’s Werner Herzog, of course, but there are many, many more in all varieties of arts.

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Crabbie http://ift.tt/25DnaAw

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Out to sea with the Amsler lab http://ift.tt/24ll2HI

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Maybe the only tail shot I got http://ift.tt/1sQ1jUF

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Humpbacks, taken while I was on a zodiac (a little rubber raft) right next to them with Chuck and Maggie Amsler, who have an island in the Antarctic named after them! How's THAT for name dropping. http://ift.tt/1Y5aa12

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Ice next to the station on my next to last day http://ift.tt/1sr2km5

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Ice and mountains, Antarctic http://ift.tt/1TM2Wtq

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Neumeyer Strait http://ift.tt/22APFcR

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Somewhere before Drakes Passage http://ift.tt/1X1iCi3

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Time lapse of me masking out the grey tonal layer of the Wilson's Storm Petrels I'm painting right now. I'm working in grisaille, which means I first paint in all the shadows in a neutral grey, and then I'll put color over the top in layers.

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Happening NOW: Palmer Station Is Iced In!

Every single thing required to stay alive in the Antarctic is brought in to the stations via import.  At McMurdo, it’s a combo of stuff being brought on the Nathaniel Palmer ship and on aircraft carriers; at Pole, everything is brought by plane; and at Palmer Station, where I was, every single thing pretty much comes via the LMG, as the Laurence M. Gould vessel is known.

It was tricky for Ernest, the captain, to maneuver around the icebergs to get in to the station’s dock (Hero Inlet is the name of that little strip of water facing the boathouse).  But if you watch the video, you’ll see that right now it’s winter, and Hero Inlet is SOLID ice. 

As my friend Zenobia Evans (she was in charge of maintenance of the station while I was there) says:

“This is what is happening at Palmer Station these days, winter setting in and ice in Hero inlet causes delays in getting the ship offloaded. Watch this incredible video and see how the station personnel deal with it. “

Thanks for taking the video, Julian. Love, your pal, the House Mouser who pulled “clean the linen closet” last summer season.

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Mash and Grind

Sheathbills from Palmer Station, Antarctica

And here are a pair of the sheathbills who were nesting at the time I drew that field note.  This pair, seen perched against the blue wall of the Bio building, had built a mansion of a nest under the Mash and Grind.  The Mash and Grind is a room-sized trash compactor used at Palmer to reduce waste- it’s where cardboard gets compacted, glass gets smashed, and every piece of trash that is not dangerous or likely to decompose gets packed away for eventual an eventual boatride to Chile for recycling. 

Sheathbills build nests that are tucked away from the elements.  In areas where they are living amongst another bird colony (they often live with penguins or cormorants), they will take over an abandoned petrel burrow or find a crack in the rocks and squeeze down in to build the nest itself, which is usually just a shallow collection of rocks and feathers at the very back of the burrow.  And then they decorate!  They come back to the same nest year after year, and continue to add to their collection of stuff surrounding the entranceway of the burrow.

A NOAA scientist told me that many times, the pairs seem to have a signature item that they like to collect.  Sometimes it’s limpet shells, or rocks of a specific color, or, if they’re around humans, some easy-to-steal item.  For the NOAA scientists at one of the field camps, it was a useful habit - when they needed to find lost radio transmitters, they would check around the sheathbill nests, and more often than not, they’d find one.

For these two, the Mash and Grind was essentially the Palace of Versailles. They stole stickers off boxes (particularly red “Fragile” stickers), bits of cardboard, anything small or shiny that somebody set down for a second, along with the usual limpet shells, feathers and pebbles. If you couldn’t find something small that you might have carelessly left around the station, their nest bower  wasn’t a bad place to check first. They are unafraid of humans, so you had to be very careful when they were around- they were quite happy sneak up and steal a pen or a hair band, or to dismantle some large piece of equipment for a prize to take back to the nest.

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Field Notes: Snowy Sheathbill, Palmer Station, Antarctica

This is the bird that I went down there to study.  It’s one of the most coveted birds of all for people keeping a Life List, not that I do that.  I am pleased that Jonathan Franzen never saw one on HIS luxury cruise to the Antarctic, in a very Nelson from the Simpsons kind of way, I admit.

Anyway: there were three nesting pairs at Palmer Station.  I watched and drew all of them but spent an inordinate amount of time watching two sets that Jeff Otten, the IT guy and sheathbill lover extraordinaire, set up webcams on.  The cams were aimed at a respectful distance towards the sheathbill nests that were under buildings, and did not in any way disturb the birds, who did not ever seem to notice they were there. 

This pair, the Carp Shop pair, were our special hope for a successful breeding.  (Carp Shop = Carpenter Shop.  They tucked their nest under the raised floor of the building, very far back underneath and shielded from wind and ice.  Snow still blew back there all the time though.)  We watched with growing excitement as the birds brooded, taking turns to sit on the nest. I kept the cam on and the sound turned up in my office, and turned my monitor off when nothing was happening.  But when I heard the characteristic “guhk muh GUK muh GUK”  announcement of an incoming bird, I would switch the monitor on and start watching as they did their head bobbing greeting and switched who was sitting on the nest.

Finally, after some weeks, one morning we saw a tiny fluff ball bobbing around, a little black soot sprite of a head under the snowy plumage of the adult on the nest.  Jeff and I watched, delighted, from his office monitor as the adult fussed over a mostly unseen chick, just the top of its head showing once in a while as it wobbled around under the parent.

And then.....the camera broke.  Sub-zero temperature extremes are hard on cameras.  And since it was carefully tucked up and under a rafter above a sheet of ice, it was really difficult to get to in order to fix it.  You can’t order more parts in the Antarctic, remember.  If it’s broken, you fix it.  Or it’s just broken.

And when Jeff managed to get the camera working again, there was no activity to be seen on the nest.  No feeding a growing chick, just more brooding.  And it was now late in the Austral summer, which is a very, very short season, and the only time of year that a chick could possibly live.

Nature is mean.

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Adelie Penguin Field Sketch

Done outside at Torgersen Island penguin colony.  I didn’t bother to write the temperature down, but it was snowing, with a light wind, sometime before 5 pm on that day.

I did these in pencil and watercolor pencil while sitting hunkered down on the rocks, upwind of the very stinky penguin colony.  You can get a vague idea of how bad this smelled by my description of what the penguins are sitting in: “mud, excrement, spilled krill.”  Add in “multiply by about 500 adults and maybe another 600 chicks, and some skuas, and dead chicks, and a near-by dead seal” and you will KIND of get there.  The ammonia and old fish smell is just eye-stinging and you can smell it all the way to Palmer Station across the water on days when the wind is blowing that way.

I got out to the island on he little rubber zodiacs.  I wondered how one gets off the zodiac and on to the islands without stepping in the water, before I went down, and the answer is: you just pilot the boat right up to the rocks at the shoreline, and you jump out in your slippery rubber boots and your ungainly mustang suit, and you scramble for foot and hand holds.  You will get wet.  It will be cold, messy, smelly, uncomfortable, sometimes painful if you slip.  It will be great.

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Adelie Penguin and Chick

I thought I would start putting up some of the artwork that I did while I was down in the Antarctic. 

To start with, here’s a penguin.  This is an Adelie - there was a large colony of them just across from Palmer Station, and I was down just as they were starting to hatch.  I got to watch as tiny grey fluffballs very rapidly grew into squawking hulks the size of their parents, and then fledged out into their adult penguin suits before taking off for the southern waters.

The chicks beg from the parents with a wild-eyed flurry of squawks and pecking at their bills.  As they get older, it’s not uncommon to see an adult penguin flat-out running in an attempt to get away from their demanding infants, and for good reason - the chicks want them to regurgitate a bolus of krill, shrimp, and fish that the adult has just expended a lot of energy to catch.

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(via Puffin Day)

“....A particularly interesting painting of an arctic tern has brought it all back around. Now that I have weathered this brutal band of storms, I can unfold my memory of Puffin Day in the quiet space granted by time and distance, and I can feel it.

Emotional mission accomplished, my mind is troubled only by how to get a print of that gorgeous, unsettling tern. This solution will be simpler.

This is lovely.  Thank you, Tara. https://pdxpersky.com/2016/05/09/puffin-day/

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Field Sketching While Freezing

I’m giving a talk at the GNSI national conference in Santa Cruz, California, during the first week of July, on my time spent drawing and researching at Palmer Station.

Science and nature artists, what kinds of things would you like me to talk about?  I can talk about my personal experiences but usually I give talks to people who don’t know anything about field sketching.  What are some specific things you’d like me to cover about the US Antarctic program, or drawing in extreme environments, or that sort of thing? 

You can respond below or even hit “contact” up in the menu bar.