Highlights so far?
1. Being guided to Graves Cove, the largest gentoo penguin colony in the Falklands, by Marie, the lovely French owner of the Cove and a slice of land around it the size of Paris.
Gentoo penguins have a huge distribution! Having only ever seen them on black rock and ice in Antarctica, it was pretty novel to see them on a white sandy beach not dissimilar from one you might find in Tasmania. Even more novel to see them launching into the crashing swell and surfing alongside the striking black and white Commerson’s dolphins.
2. Our first landing in South Georgia at Salisbury Plains, in almost complete calm. We walked a short distance across the beach to one of the largest king penguin colonies in South Georgia. The strange, polyphonic buzz honk humm of the colony, sounds in unison and overlapping and altogether overwhelming.
Looked at from the right angle, there are penguins as far as you can see. After a while though, things come into sharper relief. I can see individual penguins, the impossibly smooth plumage, like sateen. I can see black feet and the arch of long necks, beaks pointed skyward in preparation for a call. There are black-beaked chicks dressed in fluffy brown fuzzballs, breeders sitting on the conspicuous bulge of a late-season egg, others preening, beaks deep in feathers, and others still at various stages of moulting, in various states of displeasure. No one likes a catastrophic moult, and being the anthropomorphising human that I am, I get the feeling that king penguins like it the least of all the penguin species. They’re so poised and refined most of the time that it must feel like quite an indignity to lose all their feathers and become such ratty, scruffy beings once a year.
Some time passes and I manage to pull my eye away from the camera lens. I see more. The beach to the right, and mountains beyond. The grassy plains behind the colony, which end abruptly with more mountains, these ones with glaciers. And the skuas. Now that I’ve seen one I see them everywhere, sweeping across the colony, swooping in for a closer look, every now and then stalling to land in amongst the penguins which, apart from a kind of shrug and shuffle aside, seem undisturbed. Which comes as a surprise at first, because they know as I do that the skuas are here to dine. Then again, the penguins far outnumber the skuas. They are bigger than skuas (even most of the chicks). And of course, no one expects all the chicks to survive.