I’ve split my account of this trip into a number of posts, partly because I couldn’t pick out only two or three photos to share, and more posts means I can share more photos! It’s hard to explain quite how difficult it is to stop taking photos of penguins. They are just so cute. Superbly adapted to their freezing cold environment, and apparently very graceful underwater, they don’t look quite so elegant when they have to be on land, either the youngsters who don’t yet have the waterproof adult coat they need to go to sea, or the adults when they come ashore to moult or breed. We visited a number of different penguin colonies, including one of an estimated 200,000 breeding pairs of king penguins at St. Andrew’s Bay in South Georgia, and no-one on the boat ever complained!
The young king penguins, in their brown hairy coats,
look so different from the adults that they were originally thought to be a
different species – which was named the woolly penguin. Some of the cuteness shows through in a
photo, but this doesn’t capture their curiosity (many waddled up to investigate
us), nor their tendency to try to run and then fall flat onto their bellies.
The adults were fascinating to watch, too, their
social interactions seeming so human. I
watched small groups of them walking, then stopping and turning to face each
other for a while before continuing on their walk; it looked for all the world
as though they had stopped to have a conversation – perhaps to discuss whether
or not to keep walking – really it was impossible not to attribute human
characteristics and motivations to them.
It seems that a lot of their interactions were to do with courtship, and
although the males and females look alike you could easily pick out the males
as they followed the females around, sometimes two or three following one
female and having the occasional squabble, slapping each other with their
stubby little wings as they tried to impress her, and stretching up their necks
as they trumpeted their call to the other penguins. I don’t know whether there is an official
collective noun, but to me it should be a cacophony of penguins.
These on the left are chinstrap penguins, of which we saw plenty in Antarctica (as opposed to the king penguins which were all in South Georgia). The
king penguins were my favourites as they are so beautiful, but as well as these and the chinstraps, we also got to
see gentoos, adelies, rockhopppers and a lone macaroni penguin
lurking in one of the chinstrap colonies. Each species seemed to have their own distinctive ways of behaving, but all of them were adorable.
OK, I can't choose between them all, so here are two more penguin photos:
Hi Louise I hope this works, have tried three times to comment unsuccessfully! Anyhow, I have enjoyed reading your blogs. You clearly have had time to process and think about our trip to the most amazing places. We all take away different things, especially from such shared experiences, and your experiences make for very interesting reading. I do hope it will be possible to keep in touch. Could you send an email address, as it would be simpler for making contact or did you put one on the memory stick? I haven't looked at that properly. We bumped into Wendy and David from Seattle today on the boat to La Colona in Uruguay and they said they had been on a trip with you and Sterling in Ushaia after leaving the boat... small worlds. My blogs will start in due course, but not immediately, as have heard that I have contract for new book to negotiate and then to write new book... all best and please do stay in touch, especially about birds, Malian music and the great trip....
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