The Expedition creates darkness at night on their ship SVS Grenville to attempt to stop thousands of nocturnal seabirds alighting aboard.

A Dark Ship

Report from Expedition Leader Paul Rose on 25th January 2017

On many of our expeditions we find a few seabirds on our deck in the morning and one of our important and fun pre-breakfast routines is to gather them up and send them on their way. But there are so many birds here at Tristan da Cunha that unless we use extreme measures at night we would wake up to a ship full of them.

So we are now a "dark ship."

Before dark we close every porthole and curtain, extinguish all outside lights and make sure that there is no light visible at all outside the ship. We do love these birds but we don’t want to be knee deep in them!

A broad-billed prion at Gough Island. One of the many birds that we do not want to crash land on our ship.
Photo by Andy Schofield