Wednesday 6 March 2024 – The journey out round and in again was unremarkable in terms of pitching and rolling en route. What was remarkable was the continued calmness and stillness in the waters of the bays we’ve visited. We parked in Fortuna Bay within reach of two separate expeditions: Anchorage Bay, offering a hike to a land-terminating glacier; and Whistle Cove, whence a one-mile walk takes one to a colony of king penguins. “What? I thought. “More ‘king penguins? Can there be much added value in that?” Misguidedly thought, as it turns out.
The two landing sites had significantly different distances for the Zodiacs to cover – Anchorage Bay was close by, Whistle Cove a longer ride. We were headed for the former, and there was a bit of a wait for the next bus to take us along; it looked like the steward helping us on to the Zodiac had to flag down a passing taxi.
We arrived to a desultory reception committee from the local wildlife.
There were a few fur seals on the beach, but the life there was mainly penguins, mostly king penguins, which are very handsome creatures.
They quite often stand in groups of three, something we noted a lot during the course of the day. From their behaviours (I have video, of course), we guess that the third in a group seems often to be a gooseberry, trying to muscle in on the action.
As well as these little groupings, some penguins seemed very curious as to what had just arrived.
The glacier appears to be relatively close.
This is a false perspective; when you breast the rise above, you are faced with a veritable Serengeti of mainly fur seals.
They are all young, some very young, and not particularly habituated to human contact – we were indeed fortunate to be able to land here today; not many people get that privilege, apparently. The team had mapped out a route for us with red poles, taking the path of least disturbance to the wildlife, but still one would quite often get rushed by a pup; if very young, one could simply ignore it, but some of the larger ones required you to face it off by clapping and raising your arms to make you appear bigger and less rewarding as a target. There was also the occasional penguin, and sometimes the seal pups would try to play with them, in which case they often got short shrift and sharp beaks.
Once across the Serengeti, onto an expanse of rocky terminal moraine, there was no wildlife, but some great landscapery.
As we found at Shingle Cove (goodness me, less than a week ago!), there were some very varied colours among the stones.
We returned to the beach and wandered along it for a while. There was a lot of wildlife activity – young fur seals frolicking in the surf, and penguins coming and going; all excellent video content – but little of new interest to talk about in these pages.
Particularly in the overall context of the day; the afternoon was exceedingly – and for me, surprisingly – content-rich, even though it really only involved king penguins.
After lunch, then, we took the longer Zodiac ride to Whistle Cove. From the landing area, it’s about a mile, mainly over grass, to the king penguin colony, and you pass some nice landscape.
You can see the colony from a distance
and, at “only” 7,000 breeding pairs, it’s not as large as the one we saw at St. Andrews Bay. But there, we weren’t allowed to land; here, we could get really very close, and could get some sense of how densely packed the colony is.
King penguins are, we’re told, so named because when they were discovered they were the largest penguins yet seen. This gave a tiny problem when an even larger species was discovered; that species, though, spends its time in more central, less accessible parts of Antarctica, and so are very rarely seen by punters like us from Hondius. However, they’re larger than king penguins, which is why they’re called emperor penguins. Emperors, apparently, trump royalty. Really?
Having been told we had over two and a half hours at Whistle Cove, I had been expecting to get rather bored; after all, seen one king penguin, seen ‘em all, yes?
No.
Being so close to the sight, smell and extraordinary sound of the colony was a completely different experience from viewing them from a Zodiac. It was rewarding to start watching for behaviour patterns and other characteristics, rather than just getting nice photos of penguins. Those were, of course, easy,
(another group of three, see?) but there was a lot else going on. Jane, particularly, was good at spotting points of interest within the colony and alerting me to them so I could take a look and some photos.
We had to be very careful, for example, because some of the penguins were incubating eggs.
These two were particularly charming; they each have an egg in their special brood pouch and balanced on their feet as they sit on their heels – and they’re fast asleep as they incubate the precious egg.
Further round the colony, we could see some chicks, which have such different plumage that at first they were thought to be a different species. Some are nearly as large as their parents
but the younger ones are smaller and engagingly dumpy.
Jane even spotted an egg; it was such a warm day that the parent will actually release the egg from its pouch to stop it overheating. It takes patience to wait and spot, but eventually I managed to get a shot of one, too,
as well as catching the parent checking the egg and coaxing it back into the pouch.
Jane also alerted me to some chick feeding activity. A chick will pester a parent for food,
and eventually will get it, from the store that the parent has managed to accumulate in a special pouch in its craw.
The chick may take more than a year to fledge so king penguins mostly breed biennially. As a result there are incubating eggs alongside newly-hatched and last year’s chicks side by side in a continuously occupied colony. However young need to be fat enough by April to survive the winter when food is very scarce; not all those emerging from the eggs we saw will have time to reach that point.
We also spotted an adult in the late stages of moulting.
Re-growing your entire set of feathers is a very energy-hungry process, so moulting penguins will stay as immobile as possible while the process completes – until moulting has finished, they are not waterproof and so cannot enter the sea to get food.
Nature being what it is, not everything is fine and wonderful.
This is a skua, feeding upon the corpse of a penguin, whilst others wander around, seemingly unaffected by the scene.
Just beside the penguin colony was a group of another local bird, the South Georgia pintail,
with its distinctive yellow bill.
And Jane caught a picture of a South Georgia pipit, which one could just hear singing above the racket of the penguins.
Finally, on the way back to the landing area after an absorbing couple of hours, we saw another leucistic fur seal, obviously very sleepy but equally in need of a good scratch.
So ended an excellent day’s expeditioning – tiring, but rewarding. We’ve been astonishingly lucky with the weather, which has enabled great progress, granting us four days on South Georgia and still allowing an extra day “in the back pocket” for expeditions in the Falkland Islands, our next port of call. The weather can be capricious and so that extra day might come in handy in case it’s difficult to get off the ship after we arrive.
Which is in two and a half days. There will be no scenery now until Saturday, when I believe we’ll be putting into Stanley, all other things being equal. So, there are two “sea days”, at least one of which will allow some rest and recuperation (and laundry!) after several days of relentless expeditioning. There may be some wildlife visible from the ship – who knows? We can be sure there will be interesting lectures to educate us more about the area, its geography, oceanography and wildlife, so we still have a great deal to look forward to, even without leaving the ship.
