On 16 November 1959 I arrived by helicopter at Cape Royds on Ross Island to make up the second half of a New Zealand team studying penguins and skuas. For the rest of that quite beautiful summer we worked together to unravel as much as we could of the biology of these two extraordinary species. We were living in Shackleton's 1908 hut and working about the local area made so familiar from the photographs and accounts of early expeditions.

Much of the skua's biology seemed pretty ordinary and they acted as one would have expected of any large gull, with a scavenging–predatory lifestyle. However, there were two surprises.

First, for some seemingly inexplicable reason the parents allowed the older of the two chicks to harass the younger and chase it from the nest area. Almost none of the younger chicks survived. This problem has since engaged a great deal of research, with a fine study of its causation being undertaken later at Cape Bird by one of the students there. It also set me off on a comparative study of chick behaviour and chick survival of the brown skua among the grasses and shrubs of the benign Chatham Islands environment. The consequences of this decision are still being played out with a long-term study of communal breeding among the skuas there. But that is a separate story.