being close to nature

Something that quite surprised me about my time in Antarctica, and in South Georgia especially, was the rawness of the experience – the smells (guano and sometimes rotting animals), the sounds (trumpeting king penguins, belching elephant seals and the wail/howl of the fur seals), and also the occasional death and suffering around.  Overall the sights were stunning, but this was not Disneyland.  We saw a penguin with a shocking wound from a leopard seal bite (apologies if you find the photo disturbing), standing there apparently calmly, but sure to die.  Also a young leopard seal lying on the sand on Deception Island, one half of its tail bitten off by an orca – this animal rather more obviously in distress and also unlikely to survive.  Later I watched a pair of gentoo penguins standing around their now empty nest in obvious bewilderment, not understanding why their chick was not there (taken by a skua) nor what they were supposed to do next.  I also watched a skua feasting on the remains of a king penguin.

Another factor in the experience was that it was clearly the animals’ and birds’ territory, with humans very much the visitors.  Several times trying to get somewhere we found fur seals hidden in the tussock grass growling and even charging at us.  The male elephant seals, their noses inflating as they rear up and bare their teeth at anything they consider an irritation, look like big mounds of blubber but they can apparently move faster than humans over short distances so we tried hard not to get too close to them.

The penguins were not threatening at all, indeed one laid down on the beach only two feet away from me – but we tried not to approach them too closely in case this caused them stress, as they need all their energy to survive.  Moults are particularly stressful experiences, including the ‘catastrophic’ moults of elephant seals as they shed all of their skin to get rid of all their parasites after the breeding season.  Penguins go through a major moult when they lose the brown fur of youth that is not even waterproof – they just stand/lie around on the shore while all this happens, as they cannot go out into the sea to feed until they have their adult coat.

I should also mention the ‘rawness’ of the environment – we heard of one ship unable to get out of Ushuaia due to the weather only a week after we had left, another forced to return to get medical attention for two passengers who suffered broken bones in rough seas, and our sister ship en route from the Falklands to the Peninsula but taking four days rather than the usual two as it battled the elements.  We were extremely lucky to get our landings on all four days in South Georgia, particularly in St Andrew’s Bay which is rarely calm enough – but like the vast majority of ships we were unable to get to Elephant Island, and the optional night sleeping out on the ice was cancelled at the last minute (when I was ready to go in my seven layers of clothing!) as the wind got too strong for it to be safe.

Our first landing on Antarctica, at Brown Bluff, was a close call, with everyone getting soaked by the waves breaking across the zodiacs as we battled to get to the shore, and freezing cold snow being driven horizontally at us on the land.  Some opted to stay on the ship but those of us who made it actually enjoyed the experience – isn’t Antarctica supposed to be cold, bleak and inhospitable?  Although I must say we also enjoyed the sunshine and calm seas of the next day!  The temperature rarely fell below freezing but the wind chill could make it feel colder some days.  Many people on my ship were seasick at some point (luckily I was not), and one lost the end of her thumb as a door slammed shut on her when the ship was being tossed around crossing the Drake passage.  Not a trip for the faint-hearted although on a big cruise ship it would be easier (and less exciting) than on the little ice-strenghtened expedition ship that I took.

a blubber of seals

Another creature that is superbly adapted to a life in cold water but that has to struggle ashore for certain parts of the life cycle is the elephant seal.  These were mostly lying around moulting when we visited.  Every so often one would snort, or hump its massive body a few metres along the beach (moving rather in the manner of a giant maggot), or open its mouth wide and belch – they were fat, slobby and bad-mannered!  The males were bad-tempered too, easily upset by another elephant seal – or we humans getting too close – when they would inflate their nose sacs, rear up the front half of their bodies, and if another elephant seal responded in the same manner then a fight would ensue, the two seals thudding their bodies into each other whilst each tried to get a bite into the other’s neck region.

However when lying calmly on the sand they had the largest, most appealing puppy-dog eyes…

The males also have a pretty hard life, totally geared towards gaining a stretch of beach with females on it, which the victor apparently has to fight for, on around an hourly basis, to retain it against the other males who challenge him.  A successful male gets to mate with all the females on the beach – which can be around fifty – but many males never get control of a beach and thus never get the chance to mate at any point during their lives.  The constant fighting for this right takes its toll and the average male elephant seal lives only half as long as the average female.

Quite a bit smaller than the elephant seals are the Antarctic fur seals, of which we saw many hundreds (or perhaps thousands).  They are also quite appealing when calm, but frequently bad-tempered and aggressive and some of our group found it hard to follow the instructions when challenged – to make yourself big and noisy rather than running away!  Their babies were incredibly cute and also tried to intimidate us but without any success whatsoever.

Unusually we didn’t get to see any weddell seals, but we saw a number of crabeater seals lounging on icebergs.  These are the second most numerous mammal on earth (second to human beings), which I thought was amazing given how few people ever see one.  We also saw a number of whales, mostly humpbacks but a few other species including, possibly, a blue whale.  The humpbacks were feeding in groups and put on quite a display – I think most of us eventually managed to get the classic photo of a tail fluke.

a cacophony of penguins

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:

A history lesson

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to visit Antarctica.  I think initially the desire sprang from seeing some spectacular photos of icebergs, then later the penguins became another draw.  & if you want to see penguins then there’s no point going all the way to Antarctica without detouring to South Georgia en route for the massive king penguin colonies … and it all gets a bit expensive.  But as the desire to go there was never going to go away, last year I decided to bite the bullet and signed up for a trip.

As is standard, this also included the Falkland Islands, in which I didn't have all that much interest, to be honest.  However it proved to be not only rewarding in terms of the wildlife but also in filling in some of the big gaps in my knowledge of the Falklands war and its aftermath.

The British are still not welcome in Argentina, it seems, or at least not in the town of Ushuaia.  The photo above reads “Mooring forbidden for English pirate ships” – and although I acted like most English tourists by laughing in delight and taking a photo, the intent is serious, as this prohibition has actually been written into Argentinian law.  For the Argentinians the whole of my three week trip around the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula have been in Argentinian territory.

I missed the Falklands war as I was volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel at the time, and with Israel having invaded Lebanon during the same period there was no news of the Falklands filtering through at all.  By the time I got back to the UK in September it was all over and my mind was too busy with all the novelty of starting at university to want to investigate this little bit of history that I had missed.  So I found the lecture on the ship about the geo-political history of the Falklands very interesting.  As a Canadian-operated ship with a multi-national crew and passenger list, I presume the lecture was unbiased – certainly they covered the African origin of the land itself, the history of British occupation and the claim of the Argentinians based on the short-lived settlement founded by a Frenchman born in Germany but at the time (in the mid-1820s) based in Argentina.  

But of course on the islands themselves everything is ultra-British, from the telephone and post boxes to the ubiquitous Land Rovers.  

& I was lucky enough to get a history lesson from a third-generation resident, after he had scuppered my plans to visit the museum by giving me a lift out to a place where it was possible to see the rufous-chested dotterel.  Much to the envy of the some of the more serious birders on my boat who were not so lucky.  This retired gentleman was kind enough to drive me, a guide and another tourist out to a rocky spit of land to see the bird, and then on the drive back he volunteered plenty of information about the war and the subsequent period.  I asked him whether the islands had gained in any way from the war and he explained how before the war the people had long been asking the British government to declare a fishery zone around the islands but this had not been done as it would have been counter to the secret negotiations over sovereignty between Britain and Argentina – but following the war a 150 mile zone was declared, resulting in a rise in the annual income of the Falklands government from £6 million to £35 million.  This transformed the islands, with a programme of capital investment including a new school and roads and full funding of sixth form education for islanders at boarding schools in the UK, and now the islands are self-supporting financially with no subsidy from the UK. 

It was a fascinating day, and probably the only time in my life when I could claim to be in two different countries at the same time.

Also very enjoyable was the mixed nesting colony of black-browed albatrosses and rockhopper penguins.  As you can see from the penguin photo-bombing the picture below, the albatrosses just sat calmly and serenely on their nests while the penguins squawked and waddled awkwardly around them.

The (flightless) Falklands steamer ducks were also enjoyed by many of us as they fed on the beaches.