Some of you have asked for video of our Antarctic adventure. Here's a first glimpse:
The expanse of adult penguins and chicks at St. Andrews Bay on South Georgia Island was hard to fully absorb. It spread in every direction. (Please note that you can click on each photo in this blog and see it much larger.)
On a Beach With 200,000 King Penguins and Southern Elephant Seals
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.
Eight Things to Do If You Hit 30-Foot Waves On the Way to Antarctica
Pamelia and I were heading for one of the wildest and most astounding places on the planet, an island "smack in the middle of nowhere," in the words of our Antarctic expedition organizer, the esteemed British zoologist, conservationist and wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine.
He was speaking not of Antarctica—though he could have been—but of South Georgia Island, the breathtaking Serengeti of Antarctic wildlife. Small (100 miles long), rugged (11 mountains more than 6,500 feet tall, plus glaciers) and uninhabited (except for staff at two small science stations and a post office/museum/British government office located near an abandoned whaling station), South Georgia sits 750 miles from the nearest speck of civilization, the Falkland Islands and more than 1,000 miles from any continent.
To reach South Georgia Island, our Russian oceanographic ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, would travel through 30-foot waves and cross one of the most distinct geographic and climatic boundaries on Earth, the Antarctic convergence. That's where warm ocean waters from the north collide with frigid waters from the bottom of the planet. Weather, animal life and scenery (here come the icebergs!) all abruptly change. It's where the Antarctic truly begins.
But we would not see South Georgia's snowy peaks and many thousands of penguins and seals for two to three days. What would we and our 90-odd fellow expeditioners do while our ship powered its way through roller-coaster seas? A whole lot, as it turned out. I've summed a few in my Top Eight Things to Do in 30-Foot Waves:
1) Photograph the waves to try to show their size. Photos rarely do justice to massive ocean-open swells, but below are a few of our attempts. (Unbeknownst to us, we would be seeing waves almost twice this big—50-footers—later in the trip.)
From the third deck on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov—normally about 15 feet above the water line—we looked up at colossal waves such as this one...
...and these...
...and these...
...and these...
...and oh, yeah, it started to snow heavily. That orange pod is one of the lifeboats, designed to sardine-pack 56 passengers, an adventure we hoped not to experience.
2) Try not to fall off your bed. When a huge wave smacked and heaved the side of the Sergey Vavilov—which is a remarkably stable ship, I should point out, specially designed for polar travel and rough oceans—I would sometimes start to roll off my narrow bunk. I learned to sleep with my arms out as cross-braces, my legs spread wide and my toes hooked over an edge of the bed.
3) Laugh at the adventure. Glasses and bottles tipped over and slid off tables in the dining room. As recounted to us by Roz Kidman Cox, the longtime editor of BBC Wildlife magazine who was on board and writing a diary of the journey, two of our shipmates had their mini-fridge fly out of its cubby and dump milk and red wine throughout their cabin. Another passenger was flung out of the shower while not hanging onto the hand rail. Another was emphatically hand-signaled off the bow of the ship by a Russian crew member who was worried that the next big wave might wash him overboard. Two others failed to fully screw-tighten their cabin porthole and got a cold-water bath. Another, as a solution to the roll-off-the-bed problem, put her mattress on the floor and slept on it there.
I loved the tale told to us by Richard and Sue, a delightful couple from England, of a previous voyage they had taken through rough seas. Richard was tossed across the ship's bar and cut his forehead so severely that it needed stitches. He refused to let Sue, a nurse, do the stitching because he didn't want to yell at his wife if the procedure hurt too much. Instead he recruited a crew member, who stayed up all night practicing his stitch work on a banana—and ultimately handled the procedure so well that Richard doesn't even have a scar.
4) Defy seasickness. Having suffered my whole life from wretched bouts of motion sickness, I prepared for our voyage through the world's most turbulent ocean by bringing an arsenal of anti-sickness weaponry: Bonine tablets; a wristwatch-style device that, when strapped on, shot pulses of electricity into the underside of my wrist; anti-nausea gum; a queasiness-preventing inhaler; and stomach-settling candied ginger. All of those, and my decision to be extra cautious and lie down at the hint of a whisper of approaching nausea, worked.
Bottom line: Never rule out a trip to the Antarctic because you think you'll get seasick. You very well may not. And trust me, the voyage will be worth it even if you do.
5) Try to ignore the waves and attend lectures on the wildlife and places you're about to see. Pamelia and I had been studying the Antarctic for weeks before the trip, but on board we also soaked up the knowledge not only of the renowned Mark Carwardine, who had been to the Antarctic an astounding 23 times, but also of the likes of ornithologist Simon Boyes, entomologist and ecologist Mark Thatchell and award-winning wildlife filmmaker Peter Bassett, who as one of David Attenborough's BBC producers has ended up spending months at a time at places like South Georgia dealing with things like a tent-flooding river of penguin guano and a diet of dried mutton granules (tales he recounts hilariously).
How is the Antarctic defined? Many scientists will tell you it begins not at 66 degrees south latitude (the start of the geographical Antarctic Circle) but at the more northerly and varying line of the convergence, where warm and cold oceans meet, the Antarctic environment starts and the sea becomes richer with churned-up nutrients, feeding a profusion of marine wildlife and birds.
And so en route to South Georgia, even as the ship swayed, we learned about everything from Antarctic photography (much more on that later) to sea birds to the natural history of South Georgia to the story of the ill-fated Endurance voyage led by Ernest Shackleton (whose grave we would visit on South Georgia) to the seal species we would soon encounter to the biology and Earth science of the 20- to 30-mile-wide Antarctic convergence zone, which we slowly angled across.
We couldn't see the warm and cold waters meeting at the convergence, of course, but beneath us the colliding waters were churning up nutrients that would feed countless billions (trillions?) of tiny, shrimp-like krill, on which Antarctic's larger ocean mammals and birds directly or indirectly feast. The water temperature, which had been about 43 degrees Fahrenheit in the Falklands, dropped by 11 degrees F to 32. (Around Antarctica proper, the water is 28 degrees, a sub-freezing temperature it can reach because of its saltiness.)
That's Ernest Shackleton's famously ice-trapped ship, the Endurance. Enriched by the insights of our ship's spellbinding young Scottish historian, Katie Murray, we would in the days ahead be following Shackleton's path, rediscovering his remarkable tale of survival and even seeing his final resting place.
We would see all of these except the Ross seal, which lives closer to the South Pole.
6) Act like a real sailor and scrub your gear. In our case, we had no choice. One Oceans Expeditions is a stickler for "bio-securing" the boots and outer clothing of its voyagers to avoid spreading invasive diseases, plants or animals to any of its Antarctic destinations. We had been scrubbing off anyway before and after each trip ashore, but the time at sea was a good opportunity to bring out not just brushes and disinfectant but also vacuum cleaners, to suck up any stray seeds that might be hiding in the velcro strips on our jacket and pant straps.
Pamelia at the scrubbing station.
7) Be creative. Pamelia takes risks as an artist. Despite the rough seas, she flung our cabin window open, kneeled on my bed and, grabbing materials she had handy, attempted to do some small indigo ink paintings of waves while trying not to fall over. She said they were quick studies (indigo wouldn't have been her color of choice to represent the water) to try to grasp, interact with and record an impression of the incredible ocean moment—AND it was great fun. That was a lesson: When the giant waves come, have fun and get to know them!
"I was aware of what a rare experience this was and wanted to try to know it more," she said afterward. "It was challenging to paint while being jolted by wave action. Sometimes the brushstroke was made by the wave—my hand would involuntarily be jerked and the brush would make marks that I didn't control. I loved the process. Now every time I look at this little painting I'll be brought back to this moment."
Pamelia's sense of artistic adventure matched the wild sea conditions.
This is a study using white ink in a notebook with black paper, for which she had to think in reverse when trying to represent dark and light. In the days ahead Pamelia would be painting and drawing on the ship and on land, producing 30 studies and experimenting with a video component that we'll show you in the days ahead.
8) Think of the amazing sights ahead. "Ships run on two things: diesel fuel and rumors," Boris Wise, the day-to-day expedition leader, told us all during one of our meals at sea. He knew that we adventurers were all speculating on when we might set foot on South Georgia, given the rough ocean conditions and strong winds. We were beyond eager.
And then the sightings began: the first snow petrel, named for its pure whiteness. The first wandering albatrosses, the first gray-headed albatrosses, the first chunks of sea ice and glowing blue icebergs. And then...
...land. The first rocky, snow-capped islands we laid our eyes upon were the Willis Islands, just west of the main island of South Georgia. Then came South Georgia itself, forbidding and gorgeous, its white peaks rising as high as 9,600 feet. Seeing it, even from a distance, while standing in the biting cold wind on a viewing wing off the bridge, we were in awe. South Georgia was spectacular. And we were going to explore it.
Land ho! We were about to embark on four days of exploring South Georgia.
Inhospitable? That's what explorers from Captain Cook on have called it, but the animals living there would turn out to be quite hospitable to us human visitors.
At dinner that night, Boris gave us the good news. Tomorrow there would be a 4 a.m. wakeup call, followed by a quick 4:30 breakfast and a 5:30 departure on Zodiac rafts for South Georgia—specifically the beach at St. Andrews Bay, home to more than 100,000 king penguins, many thousands of elephant seals and the retreating Ross glacier.
We were, to borrow assistant expedition leader Nate Small's phrase from a few days earlier, about to have our minds blown.—Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Coming next: Can you imagine a landscape of penguins and seals as far as you can see?
Look at what's ahead!
A Falkland flightless steamer duck took her chicks out for a swim in waves that knocked them about but didn't stop them from huddling near her.
Antarctic Diary: The Falklands' Endemic Birds and the Value of Sitting Still
Our exhilarating morning on West Point Island now over (see previous post), Pamelia and I climbed out of the black Zodiac, reboarded the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, "bio-secured" ourselves by rinsing our boots and lower pant legs at the disinfecting station, shed our winter gear and headed to the ship's dining room for a deliciously hearty lunch of carrot-ginger soup and lasagna and a series of wasn't-that-amazing conversations with our fellow Antarctic-bound expeditioners.
By 3 p.m. it was time to leave again.
Less than 48 hours into our nearly three-week voyage, we were discovering that each day would be filled with explorations and discoveries—even when we didn't leave the ship. The journey to Antarctica would be fully as memorable as Antarctica itself.
We put our winter gear, backpacks and life jackets back on, rinsed our boots again at the disinfecting station and rode a Zodiac to another of the 780 islands that make up the Falklands. This small one—just two miles long and six miles wide—was called Carcass Island and was owned by a farm family.
Carcass Island was our second stop in the West Falklands; we would next head to the East Falklands to see Stanley and bird-nesting habitats around it.
We roamed the tussock grass and rocky shore of Carcass Island, where in a remarkable stretch of just 100 yards we watched 15 species of birds flying, swimming, resting, feeding and nesting.
Scarcely had we had stepped out of the Zodiac when we saw the first ducks, shags and oystercatchers. Soon we noticed smaller birds flitting around rocks on the shore. Simon, the expedition ornithologist, had told us before we left the ship that Carcass Island was one of the rat-free—and thus more small-bird-friendly—oases in the invasive-rodent-plagued Falklands. "We're going to see Cobb's wrens," he promised.
A blackish oystercatcher posed coyly...
...before revealing his brilliant orange bill...
...and flying off.
The Cobb's wren is one of the Falklands' two endemic bird species, meaning native to the islands and not found anywhere else. It is considered vulnerable to extinction because of its limited range and the Falklands' rodent problem, which dates back to the arrival of Norway rats on ships in the 1700s. (Norway rats can swim far enough that they spread from island to island.) Because the Cobb's wren nests on or near the ground, the rodents eat its eggs and chicks. That and the loss through animal grazing of tussock grass, part of the wren's nesting habitat, have reduced the Cobb's population to several thousand pairs.
Filled with personality, the endearing Cobb's wren serenaded us when not zipping around hunting for insects and small crustaceans in the tidal zone.
As amazing as this sounds, the Cobb's wren sang even when he had an insect in his beak. We loved this little guy.
The bird's moniker comes from Arthur Cobb, a Falklands farmer and the author of Birds of the Falkland Islands: A Record of Observation with a Camera, who in July 1908 on Carcass Island shot one with a gun, not a lens, while using rice (for reasons unknown) as his charge. The specimen was sent to the Natural History Museum in London, where it was named after Cobb.
We watched a family of the islands' other endemic birds, Falkland flightless steamer ducks, venturing out into the Carcass Island bay. As mentioned in an earlier post about the flying steamer ducks we saw in Ushuaia, Argentina, these birds are called steamer ducks because they churn their wings through the water to help propel themselves, suggesting a paddle steamer.
The mother seemed to be sounding a call for her parade of Falkland flightless steamer ducklings to march to the water.
The cuteness of the ducklings kept us and our cameras focused on them.
By venturing only a few dozen yards up and down the rocky beach, Pamelia and I saw and studied one bird after another. Many seemed curious about us. When I sat down on the rocks, a small brown tussock bird walked up to me, pecked my boot, hung around and finally moved on. He and other birds did the same with our fellow expedition members.
A mantra for the trip: Sit quietly and observe. Let wildlife come to you.
We all were learning a valuable lesson that trip organizer and renowned zoologist Mark Carwardine and other expedition leaders would repeat to us throughout the voyage: When out in nature, stop, sit still, watch and listen. Wildlife will come past you or even to you. Pamelia and I had learned this in the past from both great American naturalist and writer Bernd Heinrich (perhaps the most astute observer of nature on the planet) and a young Maine naturalist friend, Luka Negoita, who would spend 30 minutes quietly each day at what he called a "sit spot" in the woods, just observing and listening.
And so we watched and listened and learned. Here are more glimpses of our Carcass Island afternoon:
A juvenile black-crowned night heron stayed in the shadows of a low-tide rock...
...and flashed a wing like a poker player fanning his cards.
This and several other striking Magellanic oystercatchers patrolled the tidal edge. What a gorgeous yellow eye!
One Magellanic oystercatcher perched on her nest in front of us—unless it was a fake nest. Magellanic oystercatchers sometimes try to draw attention from their actual nest by sitting elsewhere and pretending that that's their nest. (I think this nest was the real deal.)
A rock shag, distinctive for his red eye patch, splashed down just offshore.
Tussock birds were curious and bold and in some cases walked right up to us, wondering who was visiting their home. They also were in the middle of their breeding season, the Southern Hemisphere spring. As ground nesters they too benefit from the absence of rats on Carcass Island.
While some of our shipmates visited the farmhouse for an afternoon tea, Pamelia and I stayed on the beach until the last Zodiacs were leaving. Back on the ship, we rested up. Tomorrow we would be hitting two more spots in the Falklands.
The next morning I went out on deck aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov and checked out the weather for Day Two in the Falklands: cold, windy and rainy, with a chance of snow.
"Two-banded plovers are known to nest here along the road," reported Simon, the ornithologist, the next morning as a cold, driving rain pelted us. We had stepped out of a shuttle bus to see the rusting wreck of the ship the Lady Elizabeth and briefly look around en route to Yorke Bay, Whalebone Cove and Gypsy Cove, bird nesting sites not far from Stanley, the islands' capital.
The Gypsy Cove hike begins.
This would be a quieter morning, a time to observe several more birds—nesting rock shags, black-throated finches, austral thrushes, turkey vultures, dolphin gulls, upland geese and others—and appreciate some of the delicate flora: dwarf heath plants, pale maiden (the Falklands' national flower), great burnet, arrow-leafed marigold, native strawberry, pig vine, and a vast range of lichens, ferns and mosses.
As elsewhere in the Falklands, yellow gorse—invasive but lovely—adorned the scene.
Some of our English shipmates compared the landscape of rocky cliffs overlooking white sand beaches, dunes and turquoise waters to that of Cornwall. The idyllic setting had one jarring element: signs declaring the beach off limits because of land mines that might be left over from the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina.
Along the trail we saw a pair of Magellanic penguin eggs in an abandoned burrow.
A moment later we saw a lone Magellanic penguin. We were not likely to see this South American species of penguin again as we journeyed farther south and closer to Antarctica. But we would see plenty of others.
Warning heeded.
Rock shags on their nests.
Our hike took us through a landscape of rock, ferns, lichens and mosses. I believe that this is a blechnum fern.
The birds at Gypsy Cove included an adult black-crowned night heron.
After a couple of hours of exploring, we traveled by bus to Stanley, the quaint and very British capital, for a couple of hours of traditional sightseeing. At the Historic Shipyard Museum we learned more about the 1982 war (through the eyes of civilians who experienced it) and also about the lone land mammal that was native to the Falklands, the warrah, which was hunted to extinction in the 1800s.
Pamelia sized up Stanley's main street, which we had walked a decade earlier while doing a travel story on rounding the horn of South America.
In Stanley all penguin tracks lead to the visitors' center...
...though Penguin wine is available in the shop up the road...
...and father along you'll find all the penguin news that's fit to print.
Pamelia went postal shopping for some of the Falklands' beautiful nature stamps.
The only land mammal native to the Falklands was a type of canid called a warrah (also known as a Falkland Islands wolf, Falkland Islands dog or Falkland Islands fox). Warrahs were extensively hunted for their fur and poisoned by Falklands farmers who feared that the canids would kill their sheep. The last one died in 1876, giving warrahs the unfortunate distinction of being the first known canid species to go extinct in historical (as opposed to prehistoric) times. During his visit to the Falklands in the 1830s, Charles Darwin wrote prophetically, "It will be ranked among those species which have perished from the face of the Earth." All that's left now is this statue in the Stanley museum.
Perhaps the most striking sight in the center of Stanley is an arch that was made in 1933 from the jawbones of two blue whales to celebrate a century of British rule in the Falklands. We would be exploring the amazing world of whales and the horrific history of whaling in the Antarctic in the days ahead as we sailed on toward South Georgia Island.
Around noon, snow began falling as we ate a picnic lunch on the empty Stanley town green, with a dolphin gull perched on our table hoping for scraps. It was an are-we-really-here? moment. We'd had a few of those already, but many more lay ahead as we set sail for South Georgia, the rarely-visited Serengeti of Antarctic wildlife.—Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Coming next on the blog: Have you ever been through a cyclone in a ship?
Black-browed albatrosses and rockhopper penguins shared a nesting ground on West Point Island, our first destination in the Falklands. (Scroll down for earlier posts on how we ended up on this Antarctic expedition and what we had already seen.)
"Prepare to Have Your Mind Blown": Ashore on the Falkland Islands
"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
Once on board the Russian ship the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, we left behind the panoramic world of Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia, Argentina, and entered the Beagle Channel—with a warning that high winds and rough seas would greet us within a few hours. (See our earlier blog posts below for the story of how we ended up on the ship.)
Setting Sail for the Antarctic
There are a few ways to get to Antarctica. Land a job or research time at one of the year-round science bases or summer field camps—the continent's only human-inhabited structures, each run by one of 30 countries that have established a scientific toehold there—or visit by air (a flyover from Australia, a camping/skiing adventure accessed by a plane from Chile or Argentina, a brief helicopter touch-down offered by certain cruise ships) or water (cruise line, science vessel, re-supply ship or even yacht).
Each year only about 30,000 visitors make it to Antarctica. Pamelia and I would travel there on a medium-sized Russian science ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, with a Russian crew, an international team from Canada-based One Oceans Expeditions, esteemed British zoologist, conservationist, writer and wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine and 96 other passengers, nearly all of them from Great Britain or elsewhere in Europe.
The Akademik Sergey Vavilov is 385 feet long, far smaller than an ocean liner but designed specifically for polar expeditions and rough waters.
Our delightful fifth-deck cabin on the six-level ship offered us two beds, a desk, ample storage space, a combination bathroom-shower and a view off the starboard side that would soon include petrels, gulls, terns, albatrosses, whales, dolphins, seals, stunning mountain landscapes and startlingly mountainous waves.
Pamelia tried on the waterproof gear provided by the expedition team: hooded jacket, overalls and tall rubber Wellington boots. We rented heavy-duty waterproof backpacks to carry our cameras and extra pieces of warm clothing. We would end up scrubbing and disinfecting our gear—"bio-securing" it, to use expedition leader Boris Wise's term—before and after every visit to shore, to avoid spreading microbes or invasive animal or plant species to delicate island environments.
Our first destination, about 500 miles and 36 hours of sailing away, was the Falkland Islands, which we would explore for two days in three separate Zodiac landings.
The only person on board we had met before was Mark Carwardine, the organizer of the trip, with whom we briefly chatted in 2011 after a talk he gave at the Watermill Theater near Bath, England. Mark is one of Europe's best-known and most respected naturalists.
Because of Mark's passionate work on behalf of endangered species—of which Pamelia first became aware in 1990, when she read Last Chance to See, the late genius Douglas Adams's funny yet sobering account of accompanying Mark on a global expedition to find species on the verge of extinction, including aye-ayes, Yangtze river dolphins and northern white rhinos—we had highlighted Mark at our Naturalist's Notebook public space in Seal Harbor, Maine. We had even commissioned Portland, Maine, artist Carolyn Heasly to make rhino stuffed animals as a tribute to Max, a southern white rhino (later killed by poachers) that was featured in the 2009 sequel to Last Chance to See, which was written and filmed by Mark with the brilliant British comic actor and writer Stephen Fry.
To this day, Pamelia considers the original Last Chance to See one of her favorite books and she has given copies of it—and of the 2009 BBC video series Last Chance to See, which is a must see—to countless friends and acquaintances.
When we met Mark Carwardine in 2011, he had finished writing and filming (with Stephen Fry) a 20-years-later sequel to the original Last Chance to See. That green book is a tattered copy of the original, which we brought along on our Antarctic voyage. The top inset shows the hardcover sequel and one of the Max-the-rhinos we had an artist create after we read and watched that equally important sequel. (Click on the video interview below to see Max the rhino and learn more about Douglas Adams and Last Chance to See.)
As wonderful as we knew Mark was, we were still surprised to learn that more than three-quarters of the passengers on the Vavilov had previously taken trips with him, to places ranging from Baja California (Mark's favorite place for seeing whales) to the Arctic. One passenger had taken something like 14 such trips. Given that, and knowing that Mark had been to the Antarctic 23 times, we knew we had picked the right voyage for our once-in-a-lifetime journey south.
And then, over our first dinner on board, Boris Wise, One Ocean Expedition's leader for the trip, told us we'd better secure our cabins before going to bed. He said that as soon as we left the Beagle Channel and headed toward the Falkland Islands, gale-force winds and large waves from a storm were going to slam us.
Which they did. But the real excitement on this trip was just beginning.
Coming next: churning seas (below), nesting albatrosses, rockhopper penguins (also below) and the first appearance of Charles Darwin. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Our dramatic welcome to the Southern Ocean...
...and some of the rockhoppers who were waiting for us.