WE may be in for a cold festive season but spare thought for one Dales resident - who will spend it in Antarctica.

Since 2011 Stacey Adlard, a manager at Catterick’s Foxglove Covert Nature Reserve, has spent every November to April as part of the British Antarctic Survey on Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands.

She works as a zoological field assistant on the penguin and seal long-term monitoring programme and before that spent two-and-a-half years on the Bird Island, South Georgia, in the sub-Antarctic South Atlantic.

She is accompanied on the station by four other workers this year, with a further two scientists joining them in January.

On Christmas Day the team have some time off and a traditional festive lunch. The afternoon may well include a James Bond film.

Ms Adlard said: “The penguins don’t seem to realise that it is Christmas, so on Boxing Day I shall probably hike over the snow field to my study sites to do a couple of penguin counts.

“Being pretty much midsummer here, the weather is about as warm as it will get. Today the temperature is approximately minus 2C.

“Even though this is relatively warm, the wind can easily give you a wind chill factor of about -25 degrees. Happy Christmas.”