Day 2 of the guano harvest has been a success. The moveable blind continued to work, and seeing the penguins transit with the workers on the other side has been so rewarding. The disturbance from the guano workers has been a minimum this year, and it feels great to be a part of the process that has been so successful. This experience has truly been rewarding, and we can’t wait to bring all of our new knowledge home with us to share with the community.

Something that still amazes me is how much guano there really is here. The guano harvesters keep digging and digging and digging and it never seems to end. They fill up bag after bag after bag and they have only worked on one small area. It is truly baffling. After the end of each shift for the guano harvesters, we measure the area that they have extracted and take GPS points of the area to monitor the amount that is being collected. You can see the darker area in the picture below and how much guano was dug up. It is not that deep in this picture, but it produced many bags of guano.

Guano field, separated from the penguins’ area by the temporary fence.