"Prepare to have your mind blown," said Nate, the cheerful assistant expedition leader, as he piloted our inflatable Zodiac boat toward the shore of West Point Island.
After 36 hours in gale-force winds and ship-rocking waves on our voyage from the tip of South America, Pamelia and I had reached the Falkland Islands, a British territory that is a breeding ground for 70 percent of the world's black-browed albatrosses and boasts five of the planet's 18 types of penguins. We had come to West Point Island—one of four Falklands locations we would explore over two days—to see thousands of pairs of nesting black-browed albatrosses and spiky-head-feathered rockhopper penguins.
As it turned out, we and our fellow Antarctic-bound voyagers on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov would, over those two days, see a whopping 36 other bird species as well, many with wonderfully descriptive names: dark-faced ground tyrants, austral thrushes, striated caracaras, long-tailed meadowlarks, tussock birds, Magellanic oystercatchers, Cobb's wrens, upland geese, kelp gulls, flightless Falklands steamer ducks, rock shags and more.
A storm had whipped up wild waters on our trip east from South America.
Sooty shearwaters had flanked our ship as we headed toward the Falklands. These large birds (40-inch wingspan) breed in the Falklands before an epic migration of nearly 9,000 miles to Norway to escape the Antarctic winter. Trivia note: A flock of crazily behaving sooty shearwaters at North Monterey Bay in California in 1961 inspired then-local resident Alfred Hitchcock to write his classic horror movie The Birds. Scientists believe that the flock members, which were flying into objects, throwing up and even dying, had eaten algae poisoned by sewage runoff.
The distinctive black-and-white wings of cape petrels, one of the Southern Ocean's most common and beautiful birds, had already become a regular sight out our cabin window. All the way to Antarctica we would watch the petrels (which are sometimes called pintado, meaning "painted") gliding effortlessly just inches above the waves, often in groups. After fledging, amazingly enough, they remain at sea for about six years before returning to land. At age seven they start spending four months per year on land to nest and lay one egg. They do that for the remaining 10 or 15 years of their life.
It's a bit hard to see, but here's one of the playful Peale's dolphins that we passed between South America and the Falklands. Just a few decades ago these highly intelligent mammals were being caught and chopped up to use as bait for crab-fishing, causing alarm among conservationists about their numbers and future. That practice has declined (dolphin fishing is now illegal in Chile, which was the center of the problem), but scientists aren't sure how well the population of these small dolphins has rebounded.
After we rinsed our boots with disinfectant to ensure we were bringing no foreign life forms on shore, our small fleet of Zodiacs headed for West Point Island to start the adventure.
I'll let the photos and captions below tell the story of what we saw in our several hours on West Point Island.
The first sight as our Zodiac neared the shore: Magellanic penguins on the hillside watching a caracara devour what appeared to be one of their deceased compatriots, with two turkey vultures standing nearby. Magellanics are mid-sized penguins (24 to 30 inches tall) found up and down the coasts of Argentina and Chile.
We trekked for 40 minutes over a rolling, grassy landscape (the Falklands are treeless) to find the black-browed albatross nesting site.
And there it was, the colony of black-browed albatrosses on their nests, with rockhopper penguins all around them enjoying free protection from predators. The nesting area was set among clumps of tussock grass. When walking around the edge of it you had to watch out to avoid stepping on hidden rockhoppers, which at 20 inches tall are among the world's smallest penguins.
Some albatrosses groomed each other...
...while others worked on their nests. Albatrosses often mate for life, and their lives can last half a century. They don't start mating until they are seven to 10 years old.
Like other albatrosses, the black-browed has been devastated by human fishing practices, specifically the use of longlines, whose multiple baited hooks attract the birds. These lines, which can be miles long, are dragged near the surface to catch big fish such as tuna and swordfish but end up snagging and drowning large numbers of albatrosses (and sea turtles and other ocean animals) as well. The fishing industry has tried to come up with ways to reduce the albatross kill, but by a decade ago 17 of the world's 24 albatross species were in danger of extinction. The black-browed albatross population in the Falklands has dropped by 67 percent since 1950.
The rockhoppers—distinctive for their spiky yellow head feathers, diminutive stature and habit of (what else?) hopping from rock to rock—occasionally snatched nesting material from abandoned albatross nests to add to their own nests.
Our group maintained its own perch, in awe of what we were seeing and careful not to disturb either the penguins or the albatrosses.
The rockhoppers were vocal little guys. Click on the video below to see and listen to some of those at the West Point Island colony.
Pamelia ventured off to sketch a lone rockhopper that emerged from the tussock grass.
A striated caracara watched us watching the albatrosses and rockhoppers. Like the penguins, he seemed unafraid of us.
Our flock of red-coated wanderers finally hiked back toward the Zodiacs.
Along the way a long-tailed meadowlark flew to and fro, plucking insects from a patch of gorse.
I loved his streamlined look when he flew.
Simon, the ship's ornithologist, identified this for me as a dark-faced ground tyrant, a species of tyrant flycatcher. That "tyrant" group got its name based on the behavior of its original member, the Eastern kingbird, which was known to boldly chase larger birds away from its nest.
As his look suggests, this austral thrush is a relative of our American robins.
As we neared the Zodiacs, a family of upland geese scurried off.
The gorse and the almost Caribbean-blue water at West Point's harbor, where our Zodiacs were waiting for us.
After hours observing and photographing all this wildlife, we were happily tired and filled with wonder. And it was only lunchtime. We had a Zodiac to catch and three more stops to make in the Falklands, including one a few hours hence at the intriguingly named Carcass Island. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Coming next: Carcass Island, the East Falklands, Of Rats and Wrens, and more of those 36 bird species