Tag Archives: Penguins

Oh! To go to Otago!

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Still Saturday 21 March 2026 – Apart from being in the right place to be collected for our afternoon excursion, we had to get back to the hotel so that I could pick up the Nikon and the Big Lens, for the outing was, if not a walk on the wild side, at least a coach ride on it. Accordingly, Danny, one of our guides from Monarch Wildlife Cruises and Tours, came along to add us to his small busload of people to be taken out to the Otago Peninsula to see what wildlife possibilities it threw up. (Monarch has been quick off the mark – it has the URL wildlife.co.nz, getting which must have required some nifty keyboard warriorship.) A quick look at the terrain of the area will reveal that the peninsula is part of a largish volcanic caldera with other volcanic bits also part of it,

so any journey on the peninsula was going to be up-and-downy and left-and-right-turny. We had two more punters to pick up at Portobello before we could go in search of non-human quarry. Danny explained that the Portobello name came about because of the Edinburgh link with Dunedin; Edinburgh has a Portobello (something I didn’t know – my geographical knowledge is truly being expanded on this trip) and the settlers on the peninsula decided that Dunedin needed one, too.

On the drive there, we saw some lovely scenery.

or, rather, Jane did. I was on the wrong side of the bus. Danny also pointed out various bits of wildlife that we passed, mainly birds. Again, I was on the wrong side of the bus, but managed to snatch a quick snap of a Caspian Tern,

which is apparently not a common visitor to New Zealand.

Having picked up our two final punters, the tour went to Hoopers Inlet, to find New Zealand sealions. There was a sealion creche

where an on-duty mother sealion kept watch whilst pups played.

A little along the beach, other females took it easy

whilst our group and others took advantage of their proximity to get photos. The normal rule is to keep 20 metres away from sealions, but there’s a fence here which allows people to get close.

It’s worth noting that we were cautioned against getting too close to sealions, particularly the blokes. They can (a) get grumpy, (b) take offense and charge and (c) weigh upwards of 300kg. Very different from the advice we got for the fur seals in the Antarctic; they might essay a charge but vigorous arm waving is enough to dissuade them. As I’ve said before, fur seals aren’t true seals – they’re more like small furry sealions. Sealions and fur seals are what are called “eared seals”, and one can just about make out external ears on each. Sealions, though, are larger, and the males are more aggressive; they prefer sandy beaches whereas fur seals tend to colonise rocky outcrops. And they both have different skeletal structures from the “true seals” (e.g. leopard seals, elephant seals), which have shorter legs and arms and thus much more difficulty moving about on land.  True seals swim with their feet; eared seals with their arms.*  It’s easy to see the arms and legs of a sealion when it’s in motion,

like this mother, who we think was coming over from the sunbathers either to tell its progeny off or to take over babysitting duties.

I looked away from the sealions on occasions (the kids’ play is terribly cute but after a while it gets somewhat predictable) and managed to get a photo of an incoming pied stilt.

After a while, we decamped to another beach, Allan’s Beach, just round the corner, where there were a few more sealions, including a large male. Apparently the older they are, the darker they get, a neat trick that humans have to use chemicals to emulate.

There were other sealions on the beach, but very little of what you might call “activity”,

so we eventually moved on to the next phase of the tour which, for us, was a boat trip. The boat in question was the Monarch (which guesswork makes me think might be the inspiration for the company name).

It was skippered by Buddy, who has taken the beardedness that typically marks out New Zealand boat skippers to a new level.

The objective of the cruise was to go out to view the Otago Albatross Colony out at Harrington Point. This is the colony for which (you’ll remember, of course) the return of the first albatross every year gives rise to joyful pealing of the St. Paul’s bells. Buddy piloted the boat and simultaneously gave a running commentary, demonstrating a good knowledge of what the birds were up to. His delivery was somewhat idiosyncratic, but the content was very interesting.

The headland in question

features a lighthouse, unsurprisingly, I suppose, but you’ve seen lighthouses before so I haven’t included a photo of it. Looking closely at the terrain enables you to see where albatrosses have their nests

which are just mud piles built up year on year and returned to each year by the parent albatrosses, which basically mate for life. It wasn’t nesting season, which is why there were no birds there. Where they were was further across and up on the cliff

where young albatrosses were going through the process of pairing up. There would be displays on the ground so that males and females could suss each other out,

and a lot of “Ho, watch me glide!” as a tactic to impress potential mates.

Northern Royal Albatross

The albatrosses that were landing and taking off and gliding about were Northern Royal Albatrosses. Whilst we were there, we also saw some White Capped Albatrosses, but they were merely interlopers and not part of the colony.

White-capped Albatross

White-capped Albatross

There was a certain amount of non-albatross action on the cliff face; some cormorants of a species whose name I can’t remember, but which Buddy said were quite rare,

and a vast mass of gulls clinging to the rock face

(with some shags among them).

On the rocks below were some fur seals (rocks, you see – told you so) and there was a comedy moment as one young pup decided that he would climb up and play with the gulls.

He really went a long way up

until eventually his mum came along to tell him that it was time to come down for his tea, or some such.

After our short (one-hour) cruise, for the final component of the day’s outing, we went to the opera. For the ghastly shrieking singing art form, I would have been reluctant to join in, but this was The Opera, the Otago Peninsula Eco Restoration Alliance, a private eco-reserve dedicated to conservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and education [their Oxford comma, not mine, I hasten to add], which is an entirely different kettle of fish-eating birds (and other wildlife). Starting in 1985, the property was transformed, by previous land owner Howard McGrouther and conservationist Scott Clarke, from a working farm into a crusading endeavour to save endangered penguins. It’s a good story of a concerted and linked effort to conserve and protect a species of penguin that was in danger of extinction – the yellow-eyed penguin, or hoiho. The reserve allows tourists to view hoiho while out of sight in specially built trenches. There’s also a rehabilitation facility for penguins, a safe place where injured, starving and unwell penguins (principally hoiho, but including other species also) can be treated for their injuries, fed and brought back to health before being released back into the wild. This was our first stop. It was a slightly bizarre experience, because we saw a compound full of basically motionless penguins.

The reason for this is that it was the moulting season for these birds. Unlike many birds which moult small quantities of feather all the time, penguins undergo what is known as a “catastrophic” moult, in other words they exchange their entire set of feathers for a new set all in one go.

Moulting is an energy-consuming (and I think quite uncomfortable) time for penguins, which is why they don’t move around much when it’s happening. Whilst they moult, also, they cannot enter the water since their plumage is temporarily not waterproof, so they can’t swim to feed themselves. Ain’t nature a strange thing? A couple were doing a bit of mutual preening

but otherwise all was still. The main type of penguin was, indeed, the hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin;

but there were others, too: the fjordland penguin

and the erect-crested penguin.

(a subtle difference – the erect-crested penguin’s two crests are nearly parallel rather than in a sharpish V shape).

After the enclosure, we moved out into the open-air part of the reserve,

where nesting boxes have been set up for incoming wild penguins.

They were largely empty, but one had at least one inmate and clear evidence of moulting.

We also saw a couple of fur seals

and, round the corner, some more, including another young’un with climbing ambitions. He’s the small brown maggot in the grass at the top of this picture.

By this stage it was beginning to get dark and cold and the hoped-for emergence of penguins onto the beach hadn’t happened, so we called it a day at that point and began the long and winding road back to Dunedin and our hotel.

This was our last stop in New Zealand, bar the necessary stopover in Christchurch in order to catch our flight home. So the only prospect for the morrow was the drive up to Christchurch. As ever, Jane had made sure that we couldn’t just get in the car and drive the whole way, oh dear me no. There were a couple of Things To See en route, and so I’ll regale you with those details in the next entry, which may well be the last for this trip.

 

*  If you want to be nerdish about fur seals versus true seals, then here’s what ChatGPT has to say in the matter:

All seals belong to the pinnipeds (the fin-footed marine mammals), but they split into two main families:

  • Otariidae – the eared seals, which include fur seals and sea lions
  • Phocidae – the true (earless) seals

Franz Josef – The Road To Heli

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Tuesday 10 March 2026 – Our short time in Hokitika was pretty damp, and these photos tell you all you need to know about the short drive as we continued down to our next stop, the little town of Franz Josef.

Franz Josef, apart from being the Christian names of Haydn, the famous composer of classical music and inventor of the string quartet, is the name of a famous glacier (so famous that even I had heard of it) and also of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I. That the glacier be named after the Emperor was the idea in 1865 of German geologist Julius (or possible Johann, depending on which AI overview you believe) von Haast, who generously gave his own name to a town a little further down the coast. Haast also proposed a name for the neighbouring glacier, the Fox Glacier, so it’s definitely not named after Samantha Fox (Google her name unless you’re in the office). No, the Fox Glacier is named for Sir William Fox, a New Zealand Prime Minister (as opposed to the 14th century MP for York). Some of you might be familiar with Fox’s Glacier Mints and thus beginning to wonder if there’s a connection here, but no; the mints were originally named, by company founder Richard Fox, “Acme Clear Mint Fingers” which may have tripped off an Edwardian tongue but doesn’t really inspire; however his son’s wife suggested the family name plus “Glacier Mints”, thus creating the name we now know and love.

I’m glad I sorted that out for you.

Our accommodation in Franz Josef was the Legacy Te Waonui, which is a little piece of rainforest just on the edge of town.

View from our balcony

I was a bit surprised to find rainforest where I’d expected something a bit more, well, alpine, somehow. We looked around for some mountains

but couldn’t actually see any. What we could see is that the town is tiny, consisting basically of two streets, one of which is composed entirely of accommodation and the other, the main street, is bars, restaurants, a shop and at least half a dozen organisations offering helicopter rides of some sort or another (hence The Road To Heli). We had come for the chopper, as opposed to the chopper coming for us, as the nursery rhyme might have it.

We discovered the above as we’d had some time on our hands, so we’d gone for a walk. Obviously. At the southern edge of the town is the charming little church of Our Lady of the Alps

just outside which we caught, in the distance, a brief sight of a bird that Jane wanted to see,

but this was the best that the photo technology to hand could do. More on this later. We got a slightly higher-quality view of another bird whose call fills the air in these parts,

the New Zealand Bell Bird.

So the mainstream of this exposition – helicopter rides. We had two booked, the first one being a scenic ride, the second a heli-hike. Having seen the weather and its concomitant lack of visibility, we weren’t very sure that these would go ahead, but the morning of our first ride dawned a little clearer (i.e. one could see that there really were mountains hereabouts),

and so we were reasonably sanguine about the chances. We checked in at Glacier Helicopters, which is where our itinerary told us to, and they kindly pointed us at their other office, the Helicopter Line, further down the street, where it was confirmed that (a) they were ready for us and (b) there would be a flight. After checking in and watching the prerequisite safety briefing, we walked out to the helipad across the street to find our copter

and Richard, its pilot. There were six people crammed in for our flight and Jane and I were lucky enough to get a front seat, which definitely gave us the best view of proceedings. As we took off, I was still wondering about how good the actual visibility would be

but Richard clearly knew the way and our glacier gradually became visible.

We flew up the glacier

and touched down near a stick which someone had helpfully stuck in the ice to indicate a landing spot.

We were able to get out and walk around for a few minutes, only ducking slightly when another chopper whizzed by

and got a good eyeful of the plateau at the top of the glacier.

We clambered back in to the helicopter and Richard gave us a tour of the neighbourhood

including the Fox Glacier

as well as other, smaller glaciers that flow into or from the same bowl

before we headed back down to Franz Josef

amid increasing cloud. We learned that ours was the last flight to get away that morning, so, as ever, we’d been lucky with the weather. Not perfectly so: the flight was billed as a “Mount Cook Spectacular” and Mount Cook was hidden by cloud; but all in all it was a great experience.

This left us with a free afternoon, and our peregrinations of the evening before had led us past possibly the only non-helicopter or non-hiking attraction of Franz Josef, the West Coast Wildlife Centre.

One can see kiwi there (they have a hatching support programme similar to the National Kiwi Hatchery we’d seen in Rotorua) and also Tuatara and Little Blue Penguins. A staff member illuminated the kiwi with a red torch so we could see it (as usual and expected, no photography allowed); and we timed our visit such that we could see the feeding of the penguins. There is a pool there where they do the feeding, and the penguins were whizzing about in anticipation of getting a meal.

This one was whizzing around in circles, coming up for a breath of air every so often

This angle makes one appreciate the streamlined nature of the penguin

There are about seven penguins there, all rescue animals for some reason or other, typically boat strikes or dog attacks; some of them are missing a flipper

but they were all delighted to be fed. A lass called Sophie came out and explained about the rescue programme, and did some feeding by tossing fish in for the penguins to nab themselves, and also stopping to hand feed some of the more badly injured ones to make sure that they got their meal.

Once the feeding stopped, most of the penguins got out of the water and congregated at one end to get their close-ups.

Very cute!

Our package at the Te Waonui included a free dinner, which we took in the posher of the two  restaurants there, called the Canopy. I wonder why?

It was a five-course meal, and very fine it was, too. Afterwards we went for a walk to settle the meal down, and had a somewhat closer encounter with That Bird that Jane is anxious to see.

Our second day in Franz Josef started very early – another 0530 alarm – as we had to check in for our heli-hike at 0730 and we wanted to make sure we got a breakfast down us first. We kitted ourselves out in the best approximation we could make of gear appropriate for hiking on a glacier (layers of clothing, gloves, hats, decent walking shoes) and made our way to Franz Josef Glacier Guides,

where it soon became apparent that this glacier hiking thing was a bit more serious than that. We checked in and filled in the usual medical disclaimer which said that if we died it was our fault, and joined our group, among which we were the oldest by an estimated two generations! We had to do a miniature assault course – a couple of huge steps up and down without using handrails, to make sure we could cope with that kind of activity Up There, and then our guide, a lovely Norwegian lass called Guri,

got us weighed and kitted out in proper hiking-appropriate boots, jackets and trousers, carrying our crampons in red bags,

and prepared us for what might go wrong – ice fall, rock fall, delay in being picked up, possibly an unscheduled overnight stay on the mountain if the weather really kicked up rough. She then led us to their helipad – a half-kilometre walk, actually – where, unfortunately, she got the news that the weather outlook was for the cloud to come in, so our trip was cancelled.

We both received this news with mixed emotions: disappointment that we wouldn’t be able to do the trip; relief that the concomitant opportunity to make a complete arse of oneself on a mountainside has disappeared; stoicism that of course they had to be safe and couldn’t afford to take the chance. But since today was our last day here, rescheduling was not an option. Ah, well; we’d been pretty lucky everywhere else, and at least we’d had the scenic ride. We felt very sorry for some of the young things in our group, though, who had been eagerly anticipating their first-ever helicopter ride.

Having taken coffee, we walked past a display in the town which showed a photo from 1905 of Edwardian folk doing the glacier hiking thing.

At first I wondered how the hell they got up to the glacier, but then realised that in those days it probably reached right down the mountain so one could more easily scramble up to it (and the surroundings in the photo bear that out). There was also a photo of something we’d missed out on, which is an ice cave visit

and I think those folks are rather better kitted out than the ladies and gents in the photo above it.

Further walking around the town gave us the chance to get a better photo of a Tui

and also of another local phenomenon.

The New Zealand Marmite, we’d seen before, and, having heard the Men At Work song, we knew about Vegemite; we think Promite is a New Zealand version of Vegemite, but we weren’t prepared to buy some to find out. Well, not at first, anyway.

This left us with time on our hands, and, in recognition of the early start we decided to console ourselves by getting some rest, in order to recover before going for a walk. Obviously. The walk that Jane had picked out started after a short drive out of town to the Franz Josef car park. From there the original plan had been to do the Sentinel Rock trail with half an eye on the possibility of being able to take a picture of That Bird, the one we’d failed to get a decent photo of the evening before. So, I attached the Big Lens to the Big Camera and we set off for the car park. We discovered that, as well as Sentinel Rock, one could walk up to a viewpoint for the Franz Josef Glacier, so we decided to do both. The local birds, having seen me attach the Big Lens, all either fell utterly silent or buggered off en masse. I heard one bell bird the entire time we were walking, and I think it’s tone was somewhat mocking.

The walk to Sentinel Rock is short and quite steep

but the view at the end is worth the climb.

There’s an info board there which gives an idea of how much the glacier has receded (19km from the shore that it originally reached) and also shows that the Edwardian ladies and gents could quite easily have walked up to it in 1905.

We doubled back and then headed to the Glacier viewpoint. It’s reasonably clear where it is when you get there.

The view is majestic, but not quite as exciting as the one you get from a helicopter zooming up it.

On the way back to the car, Jane spotted this rather lovely example of a “fiddlehead” – the unfurling new frond of a fern.

Back in the town I decided that we should buy some Promite after all, so we popped into the shop to get some. Heading back to the car, we heard the distinctive call of That Bird, so Jane went to investigate and excitedly bade me hasten myself over with the Big Lens in hand. So I got the Lens out of the Kia and hurried over and was able to start taking photos of a Kea.

Anyone expecting a brightly coloured bird tends to be disappointed in New Zealand, where most birds are brown so as to camouflage themselves against the endemic predators, falcons or hawks. That’s why these Keas are the colour they are.  However, if you get up close, you can see that there’s a subtle variation, and these Keas, identified as juveniles by the yellow eye-ring which becomes grey in adulthood, were clearly too young to know the rule of bird photography that says you bugger off when a Big Lens comes out. They obligingly came closer and indeed ended up doing something they’re known for, which is disassembling bits of car trim.

Jane was hoping to see the flash of colour on the underside of their wings, and so we spent a certain amount of time and a ridiculous number of shots trying to capture a photo of them in flight. But we got there in the end, thanks to luck, persistence and the excellence of Nikon autofocus.

So, that was it for Franz Josef – a couple of good days, a touch of bad luck with the weather, but an excellent glacier helicopter ride and some successful photography.

The morrow sees us moving further south again (possibly via another glacier view walk) to a lake, so there will probably be more decent shots to view, should you want to come back and take a look.

 

Videos – and learnings – from the Southern Ocean

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Sunday 31 March 2024 – I’m pretty happy with the way that the images that Jane and I captured during our time on Hondius convey the look and feel of the places we visited and the sights we saw.  However, there’s the small matter of the 460 video files that we accumulated during the trip, so I have spent the last couple of days trawling through that mass of content – about 100GB – for sequences that supplement or complement the images which you’ve already seen.

To be honest, the pickings are much slimmer than I’d anticipated.

It’s not that I’m dissatisfied with the videos.  Though many are utterly unusable, there are a good number of clips which will serve brilliantly in the future to remind us of the dynamism and variety of the scenes that unfolded before us. But I think you might find them dull, because of the lack of context; and buried within that bald assertion is the first learning.

For example, at Port Charcot, I took a video panorama from the ship

and it gives a nice impression of the place, the weather conditions and the scenery.  But from the point of view of showing you, dear reader, what the place was like, it’s not really any better than the photos I included in the blog posting about it.

The learning?  That sort of video has a place on Instagram in showing where I am and what it’s like there. But the restrictions on using internet bandwidth (oh, OK, the expense) meant that its value, as an ephemeral “Instagram-look-at-me” kind of post was negated. So I have several of these panoramas, but will keep them to myself for now.

That said, there were a couple of video pans that I think worthy of noting (as opposed to nothing) here: the view of Elephant Island, which was just, basically, lovely in the sunshine;

and the rather contrasting view of the south end of South Georgia.

So: no more landscape video pans, then;  I have numerous ones of bays, waterfalls or rivers, but their relevance is only to our memories, not to your insight.

I rather like, though, this view of Grytviken, on South Georgia, as we approached it from the water.

and, as a scenery/landscape topic, I thought the general amazingness of some of the icescapes was worth a collage, too.

Oh – and there was that spectacular crumbling glacier in King Haakon Bay, which makes for good viewing, I think.

So, enough of the scenery, already. What does that leave us then?  The wildlife, of course. It was a very rewarding trip for me, photographically, as I got several still images that I’m pleased with, and most of which you’ll already have seen, having assiduously read all my previous posts, you wonderful reader, you. But there are some times when a still image simply won’t do to capture or convey a scene.  Sighting a leopard seal, for example, gave me some good stills, but seeing it come under our Zodiac is a sight which stays with one.

(I have to credit one of our guides, Aitana, with the footage of the seal swimming underwater; I was unable to capture that, so I’m glad to have her snippet as a record.

Penguins, too, are very cute and photogenic even in stills. But one needs to see them doing penguinish things to get the full charm.

It was generally more rewarding to encounter wildlife on land – it gives one a better feeling of connection to what’s going on.  That sense of connection was a bit tenuous in places.  The Falklands, for example, was so windy that at times one felt one was going to be blown off the cliff face.  Here, video can give a sense of what it was like.

It was fucking windy.  I managed to get a vantage point elsewhere which felt a bit less dangerous, to capture a bit of albatross behaviour – feeding a chick until there was no more food, then flying away to get more…a parent’s work is never done.

Capturing footage like that is quite rewarding even if it feels a little perilous at some times. I suspect I’d have been OK; there were plenty of other photographers around to break my fall if I’d stumbled.

There was a second and third learning from gaining this footage. One is to listen to the experts; Ursula was nearby and told me that the parent albatross would fly when it had finished feeding.  All I had to do was to keep an eye out and I would be able to capture the decisive moments.  The other was – patience.  I had to stand and try to keep my camera trained on a particular parent-and-chick for quite some time (whilst being blown to buggery by the winds) in order to get the footage I wanted.

One development of my skill, such as it is, over the trip was to become more interested in behaviours, rather than simply seeking to get a good sharp close-up of an animal. Jane helped me a lot, and having the guides around for extra information and education was excellent, too.

Close-to was definitely the place to be for most photography purposes. But it was possible to see wildlife from the ship.  Most of the time, someone would shout “whale!” and there would be a surge of people to one side or other stare out of the windows or to rush on deck, there to catch (if lucky) the disappearing fin of a humpback some fair distance from the ship.  Having had a very rewarding whale watching experience in New England recently, I tended to stay in my place rather than join the giddy throng.  But there were some occasions where the sights were excellent even from on board. Here are a few: particularly, the fin whale feeding sequence is something that no still photography could do justice to.

And so ends our South America and Southern Ocean Odyssey, a very intense month in our lives, probably never to be repeated.  We might try an expedition cruise to the Arctic at some stage, which will be similarly intense and challenging, but I doubt we could ever be so lucky again as to the weather we had when Due South; the weather gods were incredibly kind to us and our experience was the richer for that.

That’s it for the pages about this expedition. There will be others; in the current plan we have one not-so-ambitious outing and one which could be astonishingly varied and content-rich.  As ever, an internet being available, I will write about them here, so Stay Tuned!