Greetings from South Africa!!

We're on the northwest coast of South Africa in the middle of a diamond mine.

We're here to tag Cape fur seals. These seals are the largest of the fur seals. They're not endangered. About 350,000 live on the rocky shores near the diamond mines, which are open strip mines. The males are huge -- 440 to 800 pounds (200-360 kilos) and the female weigh about 260 pounds (120 kilos). Which makes their Latin name -- Arctocephalus pusillus -- a little odd, because pusillus means "small". Here's a mother and pup. When they're born, the pups are black, but turn grey after molting.

We are deploying GPS (global positioning tags) on the females to see where they go, how deep they dive and where they feed.

To get here we flew to Cape Town, South Africa, and then drove for 8 hours to a place called Kleinsee. We passed this sign along the way.

Once there we had to go through the security as we are in Namaqulaand diamond mine, which is owned by DeBeers. [Here's an article about the mine, in the Financial Times.]

Got to run as we are about to go out and catch our first seal. We've had to wait until late afternoon. Even though it is winter, it has been very hot.