At 2 a.m., like a child on Christmas morning, Pamelia lay awake in her cabin bed, anticipating one of the most extraordinary days of our life.
Our Russian oceanographic ship, the Sergey Vavilov, had traveled 1,500 nautical miles from the bottom tip of South America to South Georgia Island, one of the most remote places and remarkable breeding grounds on Earth. Only 7,000 people set foot on this mountainous, 100-mile-long island each year. Landings must be made with inflatable Zodiacs. Tricky conditions (including gravity-pulled "katabatic" winds that roar down off South Georgia's glaciers at 60 mph) and bad timing (areas that are off-limits in key breeding months by international agreement) frequently block visitors from going ashore.
Not us. By the time a friendly 4 a.m. wakeup call came over our cabin's loudspeaker, dawn had broken on a crisp, beautiful morning: patches of blue sky, temperature 30 degrees F and the wind 17 miles per hour, a third of what it had been the previous day (scroll down for our earlier posts). We looked out and saw only a slight chop on the waters of St. Andrews Bay, the first of the day's two planned South Georgia landing sites. Game on!
The farther south we sailed, the longer the days were becoming in the Southern Hemisphere spring. At 4:30 a.m. the sun at St. Andrews Bay was already illuminating some of South Georgia's spectacular mountains.
As always, an early Zodiac tested the route to shore and picked a landing spot.
After a quick breakfast—not too much coffee, for we would be on shore for six hours with no bathroom options, as is nearly always the case on Antarctic and sub-Antarctic landings—Pamelia and I pulled on our many layers of winter clothing and grabbed our orange waterproof backpacks of camera gear. We headed off to take a 15-minute, wind-in-our-faces, cheek-burning Zodiac ride to the wildest shoreline we've ever seen.
Ten to 12 expeditioners climbed into each Zodiac...
...and off we zoomed toward a shore where we human adventurers would be outnumbered at least 2,000 to one—2,000 to one!—by king penguins and southern elephant seals.
Our new Swedish friend Eva Westerholm, a former pro soccer player and a cornerstone of the excellent and international One Oceans Expedition team, commanded the Zodiac and filled us in on what to do when we landed.
Each of those tiny dots was a king penguin or a southern elephant seal. You can also see a few penguins swimming and dolphining in the foreground. We always think of penguins endearingly waddling on land, but these flightless birds spend three-quarters of their lives in their primary home, the water—their wings have effectively evolved into flippers—and they're agile, acrobatic swimmers. King penguins can dive 1,000 feet and stay submerged for five minutes while feeding on small fish and squid. They're amazing animals.
Hundreds of the king penguins seemed eager to welcome us at the landing site.
We saw more of them swimming, heard their loud chatter and whiffed the tangy smell of penguin guano as we neared shore.
"Don't panic. Stop for a few minutes to absorb the scene around you. Take your time. Then pick one animal or a small group. Concentrate on watching them for a while."
One of the trip leaders had offered those words of advice for our landing at St. Andrews. He knew how electrifying and overwhelming the up-close-and-personal sight of 200,000 penguins and seals can be, especially for nature lovers who have cameras in their hands and are eager to shoot photos, as nearly all of us were.
The words echoed in my head as I swung my legs over the side of the Zodiac, plunked into the shin-deep 34-degree water, waded ashore in my rubber boots and entered a world that was...electrifying and overwhelming.
For the next six hours, we were wide awake to life. In a spectacular setting ringed by snowy mountains and the rapidly retreating Ross glacier (hello, climate change), with a sparkling bay in front of us and the sky constantly changing, Pamelia, I and our 90-odd fellow expeditioners wandered among, photographed and studied these fascinating animals. We watched dramas unfold—predatory birds called skuas coming after penguin chicks, male elephant seals doing battle with each other, sometimes bloodily, penguin chicks pestering their mothers for food until the moms gave in and disgorged a mouthful into the chicks' bills.
March of the Penguins? This wasn't the same species as in that wonderful documentary, but the king penguins were marching everywhere we looked on the two-mile curve of beach.
The penguins mingled among us, unperturbed by our presence and often eager to approach us for a closer look
As their name suggests, king penguins are among the most regal-looking of the world's 18 penguin species. At three feet tall and about 40 pounds, they are second in size only to four-foot-tall, up-to-100-pound emperor penguins, which live on the Antarctic continent (and were the subject of March of the Penguins).
Eight-month-old chicks often followed their mothers around begging to be fed. Quite a few of the mothers were still out at sea gathering food.
The birds communicated in ways we couldn't always understand. Many of the chicks gathered in groups called creches that were overseen by a small number of adults.
The beach was carpeted with feathers—many of the adult penguins were molting—and adorned with white, yellow and green squirt-blotches of penguin guano. It also was littered with the remnants of dead penguin chicks and sea birds. Some of the chicks may have succumbed to the long Antarctic winter that had just ended; others might have fallen to one of the skuas that were gliding just overhead and wandering the grounds looking for feeding opportunities.
The chicks' fluffy brown coats gave them an adorably comical look but weren't waterproof, so the chicks couldn't go into the ocean. The coats will fall off through molting a few months from now and the young penguins will head to sea.
Many of the adult king penguins were already molting. With their feathers falling out they, like the chicks, weren't waterproof and couldn't go into the ocean to feed. Instead they remained on shore, staying as still as possible to avoid wasting energy. Note the angled-up feet: King penguins (like the emperors in March of the Penguins) cradle their egg atop their feet to keep it warm and dry. They frequently stand in this tilted-back posture even without an egg, as was the case here.
The molting process wasn't always pretty.
The penguins' seemingly headless poses made for fun photos.
A resting chick showed us the underside of its leathery, ground-gripping feet, which didn't look so different from our winter gloves.
Some of the penguins went off to frolic on a snowy hillside at the back of the beach.
Many thousands of them gathered along, and swam in, a runoff stream from the retreating glacier. Yes, that's snow falling. Squalls moved in, typical of the constantly changing weather in this part of the world.
King penguins can live 15 to 20 years in the wild, or not make it past a few months as a chick at St. Andrews.
The skuas were a constant reminder of the threat to penguin chicks.
As were the southern giant petrels (wingspan up to seven feet), a species we would see often in the days ahead (sometimes pulling at a penguin or seal carcass). That tube atop the bill is for excreting salt from the ocean water it drinks, an evolutionary feature that other seabirds share, though not always so prominently.
This curious elephant seal pup stared, sniffed and grunted at a dead giant petrel for several minutes..
Because the beach was so large, we all were all able to explore different scenes and animals that caught our interest. As was evident from photos we saw later, each of us experienced St. Andrews slightly differently. Pamelia plunked herself down in a few spots and had long stretches with individual penguins and elephant seal pups. I roamed more widely.
Many of us followed the photographic advice given to us a couple of days earlier by trip organizer Mark Carwardine, the great wildlife photographer and zoologist. He said to drop to the ground for shots and see the animals at their level. Having a dirty jacket and pants from doing that became a badge of honor throughout the Antarctic trip.
Pamelia was one of the many ground-based shooters.
This chick became particularly fond of her—or at least her boot.
This elephant seal pup wiggled his way more than 20 feet to get within an arm's length of Pamelia as she sat on the ground. The two stared into each other's eyes for several minutes—a pair of mammal cousins from different species and parts of the planet connecting in a way Pamelia will never forget. I should note that at this time in the pups' lives, their mothers have left them to fend for themselves. The pups haven't realized yet that their mothers aren't returning, and seem to crave companionship.
Among those taking in the action in our group of expeditioners was award-winning wildlife filmmaker Peter Bassett (far left), one of David Attenborough's former BBC producers, who was shooting footage throughout the trip.
The penguins and seals coexisted comfortably...
...though the undisputed bosses of the beach were the roaring "beachmaster" male elephant seals. Each weighed between 5,000 and 9,000 pounds—southern elephant seal bulls are easily the heaviest carnivorous mammals on the planet—and ruled a "harem" of up to 100 far smaller females, which weighed one-fifth as much. The beachmasters fiercely defended their turf against other males who tried to sneak in and mate with harem members. Check out all the fight scars on this guy's neck and chest.
This was a typical example of mouth-to-mouth combat. The beachmaster always won.
By contrast, the weaned seal pups—called weaners—were playful...
...and irresistibly cute.
Some pups were still nursing. They would be doubling and tripling and quadrupling in size in a matter of days on milk that is more than 50 percent milk fat, compared to four percent for human mothers' milk. (The mothers can end up losing hundreds of pounds during nursing.)
Nearly all of the seals seemed content to lounge around in the 30-degree sunshine.
Though it was easy to chuckle at the southern elephant seals' loud and frequent vocalizations—most of which sounded like embarrassing human bodily functions—it was sobering to recall that humans hunted them to near-extinction in the 19th century. Their numbers are starting to fall again, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. These majestic animals regularly dive more than half a mile underwater (sometimes more than a mile) and stay submerged for more than 20 minutes when hunting for fish and squid. We looked forward to seeing and studying more of them in the days ahead.
As we neared the six-hour mark, we wended our way carefully around resting beachmaster seals and back to the Zodiacs. The Sergey Vavilov had to move on to our afternoon landing spot on South Georgia, a seal, penguin and albatross breeding site called Gold Harbor. The photos here scarcely do justice to what we had just experienced. We left feeling awed and humbled by the extraordinary animals and the dramatic landscape, which only one in a million humans will ever get to see.
And we weren't even halfway through this astounding day. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
It was hail and farewell to this colony of kings, but our penguin experiences were only beginning to unfold.
Coming next: Glaciers, Gold and why you shouldn't get too close to a male fur seal...
A last view of St. Andrews from the departing Zodiac. Spectacular to the end.