Korektoj

I’m from Chile and biologist.

In 2014 I took the decision of going to Australia because I want to improve my English skills that were no so good like I was suspecting.

I went there with the Working Holiday Visa and I was hoping that in this country I could work in my area of studies.

It was super hard to find a job, at the beginning I started picking fruits and cleaning houses mostly.

One day, after the thousand mails that I send to Universities finally I got a contact with an amazing woman, Natalie, a PhD student from the Tasmania University.

She was working with albatross (the scientific name of this one was Puffinus tenuirostris) in Tasmania.

I was in Melbourne and I took a fly to Tasmania, Natalie need me for the field season in the middle of April.

I arrived at the beginning of this month, so I was looking for a temporal job to wait.

I found job in the raspberry farm, picking and packing fruits in Devonport.

After three weeks working I left and I was on the way to Hobart where I will meet Natalie.

Finally I met with she, and she let me stay few days in her house.

After we were ready to go sailing in the direction of the albatross’s island next to Hobart’s harbor.

After a few hours sailing finally we arrived to the little island, if you would walk 12 hours you will know the entire island.

We had tents, no bathroom and a container with the food and a little stove.

Every summer the albatross start to fly from the Artic to this island (they have fix couples and meet in the island every year), then they come back to their old nest to have a new chick.

Each parent takes care of the chick 3-4 days until the other parent come back from feeding.

Every week the one of the parent fly to the Antarctic and come back to exchange with the couple.

The research that Nataly develop in the island is about how are the migrations route of the albatross, the state of the chicks and the nest, the state of the parents.

So our job was during the day check the nests in the island, that were under the earth at the end of few meter tunnel that the birds dug.

This job was dedicated because the earth over the nest was finer and you could brock the tunnel and kill the chicks in the nest, then in some areas we were walking in four feet to don’t make a mess.

At night we had to check the nest and check if we could find one of the parents in the nest.

Each parent of a marked nest has an ID chip and a GPS that we have to remove, to can get the coordinates of the fly.

Beside we measure the bird (e.g long of the wing, weigh…), after that we let them free.

After one in this peaceful place moth working the all albatross left and just the chicks were left in the island (in few weeks the chicks are ready to fly to the Antarctic by their own, and have enough fat to resist until the learn to fly and find food), then I was sailing back to Tasmania because the season of the field season was finish.