The windswept, wild Campbell Islands, 700km south of New Zealand’s mainland, have got under Chrissy Wickes’ skin.
Any spare moment she got during a 10-week stint counting southern royal albatrosses for the Department of Conservation last summer, she grabbed her sketchbook and scribbled as fast as she could — "15 minutes max", she said.
There were never any days off from the census and not a lot of down time from jobs such as observing and counting birds’ nests, setting up cameras and fitting transmitters and bands on some of the birds.
Then there were also camps to be set up, potatoes to be peeled and dishes to be done.
"My sketch books are my diary of the landscape, in pen and watercolour. They were very, very fast sketches. I couldn’t take a day off to do it and most were scribbled off back at base ... We did long days and I often just didn’t have the energy. There was not a lot of fuss, just instinctive, raw, my reaction to the environment," she said.
Registered as a reserve in 1954, the challenging cluster of steep and rugged islands is New Zealand’s southern-most territory, outside of Antarctica.
It rains 325 days a year. There are just 650 sunshine hours a year — less than an hour during a 215 day-long winter — and the temperature rarely rises above 12°C.
Wickes has always enjoyed marrying art with conservation.
She volunteered in remote places for Doc many times in the past two decades, so leapt at the chance to repeat voluntary work she first did at the subantarctic reserve 16 years ago.
"It is somewhere far, far away and really, really cold. But they are amazing jewels of reserves, managed by Doc, fields full of mega herbs and flowers and the sky is full of 3m wing-span albatrosses. An extraordinary place," she said.
The islands have a whaling, sealing and farming history and are closed to the public.
The only way for people other than Doc staff to get there is on a permitted and approved boat tour.
Tourists are not allowed to overnight on the island, which is now rat, cat and cattle free, and it is a place few artists get to explore.
Wickes was there from November last year until February — "a really long time away from family".
The majority of the population live on the Campbell Islands, where they scavenge for fish, squid, octopus, crustaceans and salps.
Doc’s report from the 2024 census was published on its website in July.
Previous censuses had estimated about 8500 bird pairs were breeding on the island, but Wickes says this has worryingly declined.
"Nest counts for southern royal albatross showed an overall decline of 32.8% since the 1990s and a 26.5% decline since the 2000s," a report by Claudia Mischler, Theo Thompson, Peter Moore, Brodie Philp and Wickes states.
Wickes wants to raise awareness of this key finding about the giant sea-faring bird’s population decline.
"The fishing around the island has never been better, so something is happening [to the birds] at sea," she said.
The team placed 35 trackers on the albatrosses in one of the Campbell Island study areas.
They showed the southern royal albatrosses moving north to the Chatham Rise, west to Tasmania, south towards Antarctica and to the Patagonian Shelf east of Argentina.
Since her return to Wānaka, Wickes has been pouring out island-inspired art.
She is keen to share her experiences on the Campbell Islands in her first solo art exhibition this month.
Wānaka Backyard Trapping, Forest & Bird Central Otago Lakes branch and Southern Lakes Sanctuary are helping present the show, talk and wine and cheese evening to be held at the Wānaka Community Hub on August 16, 6pm-9pm.
