Some of you have asked for video of our Antarctic adventure. Here's a first glimpse:
The expanse of adult penguins and chicks at St. Andrews Bay on South Georgia Island was hard to fully absorb. It spread in every direction. (Please note that you can click on each photo in this blog and see it much larger.)
On a Beach With 200,000 King Penguins and Southern Elephant Seals
At 2 a.m., like a child on Christmas morning, Pamelia lay awake in her cabin bed, anticipating one of the most extraordinary days of our life.
Our Russian oceanographic ship, the Sergey Vavilov, had traveled 1,500 nautical miles from the bottom tip of South America to South Georgia Island, one of the most remote places and remarkable breeding grounds on Earth. Only 7,000 people set foot on this mountainous, 100-mile-long island each year. Landings must be made with inflatable Zodiacs. Tricky conditions (including gravity-pulled "katabatic" winds that roar down off South Georgia's glaciers at 60 mph) and bad timing (areas that are off-limits in key breeding months by international agreement) frequently block visitors from going ashore.
Not us. By the time a friendly 4 a.m. wakeup call came over our cabin's loudspeaker, dawn had broken on a crisp, beautiful morning: patches of blue sky, temperature 30 degrees F and the wind 17 miles per hour, a third of what it had been the previous day (scroll down for our earlier posts). We looked out and saw only a slight chop on the waters of St. Andrews Bay, the first of the day's two planned South Georgia landing sites. Game on!
The farther south we sailed, the longer the days were becoming in the Southern Hemisphere spring. At 4:30 a.m. the sun at St. Andrews Bay was already illuminating some of South Georgia's spectacular mountains.
As always, an early Zodiac tested the route to shore and picked a landing spot.
After a quick breakfast—not too much coffee, for we would be on shore for six hours with no bathroom options, as is nearly always the case on Antarctic and sub-Antarctic landings—Pamelia and I pulled on our many layers of winter clothing and grabbed our orange waterproof backpacks of camera gear. We headed off to take a 15-minute, wind-in-our-faces, cheek-burning Zodiac ride to the wildest shoreline we've ever seen.
Ten to 12 expeditioners climbed into each Zodiac...
...and off we zoomed toward a shore where we human adventurers would be outnumbered at least 2,000 to one—2,000 to one!—by king penguins and southern elephant seals.
Our new Swedish friend Eva Westerholm, a former pro soccer player and a cornerstone of the excellent and international One Oceans Expedition team, commanded the Zodiac and filled us in on what to do when we landed.
Each of those tiny dots was a king penguin or a southern elephant seal. You can also see a few penguins swimming and dolphining in the foreground. We always think of penguins endearingly waddling on land, but these flightless birds spend three-quarters of their lives in their primary home, the water—their wings have effectively evolved into flippers—and they're agile, acrobatic swimmers. King penguins can dive 1,000 feet and stay submerged for five minutes while feeding on small fish and squid. They're amazing animals.
Hundreds of the king penguins seemed eager to welcome us at the landing site.
We saw more of them swimming, heard their loud chatter and whiffed the tangy smell of penguin guano as we neared shore.
"Don't panic. Stop for a few minutes to absorb the scene around you. Take your time. Then pick one animal or a small group. Concentrate on watching them for a while."
One of the trip leaders had offered those words of advice for our landing at St. Andrews. He knew how electrifying and overwhelming the up-close-and-personal sight of 200,000 penguins and seals can be, especially for nature lovers who have cameras in their hands and are eager to shoot photos, as nearly all of us were.
The words echoed in my head as I swung my legs over the side of the Zodiac, plunked into the shin-deep 34-degree water, waded ashore in my rubber boots and entered a world that was...electrifying and overwhelming.
For the next six hours, we were wide awake to life. In a spectacular setting ringed by snowy mountains and the rapidly retreating Ross glacier (hello, climate change), with a sparkling bay in front of us and the sky constantly changing, Pamelia, I and our 90-odd fellow expeditioners wandered among, photographed and studied these fascinating animals. We watched dramas unfold—predatory birds called skuas coming after penguin chicks, male elephant seals doing battle with each other, sometimes bloodily, penguin chicks pestering their mothers for food until the moms gave in and disgorged a mouthful into the chicks' bills.
March of the Penguins? This wasn't the same species as in that wonderful documentary, but the king penguins were marching everywhere we looked on the two-mile curve of beach.
The penguins mingled among us, unperturbed by our presence and often eager to approach us for a closer look
As their name suggests, king penguins are among the most regal-looking of the world's 18 penguin species. At three feet tall and about 40 pounds, they are second in size only to four-foot-tall, up-to-100-pound emperor penguins, which live on the Antarctic continent (and were the subject of March of the Penguins).
Eight-month-old chicks often followed their mothers around begging to be fed. Quite a few of the mothers were still out at sea gathering food.
The birds communicated in ways we couldn't always understand. Many of the chicks gathered in groups called creches that were overseen by a small number of adults.
The beach was carpeted with feathers—many of the adult penguins were molting—and adorned with white, yellow and green squirt-blotches of penguin guano. It also was littered with the remnants of dead penguin chicks and sea birds. Some of the chicks may have succumbed to the long Antarctic winter that had just ended; others might have fallen to one of the skuas that were gliding just overhead and wandering the grounds looking for feeding opportunities.
The chicks' fluffy brown coats gave them an adorably comical look but weren't waterproof, so the chicks couldn't go into the ocean. The coats will fall off through molting a few months from now and the young penguins will head to sea.
Many of the adult king penguins were already molting. With their feathers falling out they, like the chicks, weren't waterproof and couldn't go into the ocean to feed. Instead they remained on shore, staying as still as possible to avoid wasting energy. Note the angled-up feet: King penguins (like the emperors in March of the Penguins) cradle their egg atop their feet to keep it warm and dry. They frequently stand in this tilted-back posture even without an egg, as was the case here.
The molting process wasn't always pretty.
The penguins' seemingly headless poses made for fun photos.
A resting chick showed us the underside of its leathery, ground-gripping feet, which didn't look so different from our winter gloves.
Some of the penguins went off to frolic on a snowy hillside at the back of the beach.
Many thousands of them gathered along, and swam in, a runoff stream from the retreating glacier. Yes, that's snow falling. Squalls moved in, typical of the constantly changing weather in this part of the world.
King penguins can live 15 to 20 years in the wild, or not make it past a few months as a chick at St. Andrews.
The skuas were a constant reminder of the threat to penguin chicks.
As were the southern giant petrels (wingspan up to seven feet), a species we would see often in the days ahead (sometimes pulling at a penguin or seal carcass). That tube atop the bill is for excreting salt from the ocean water it drinks, an evolutionary feature that other seabirds share, though not always so prominently.
This curious elephant seal pup stared, sniffed and grunted at a dead giant petrel for several minutes..
Because the beach was so large, we all were all able to explore different scenes and animals that caught our interest. As was evident from photos we saw later, each of us experienced St. Andrews slightly differently. Pamelia plunked herself down in a few spots and had long stretches with individual penguins and elephant seal pups. I roamed more widely.
Many of us followed the photographic advice given to us a couple of days earlier by trip organizer Mark Carwardine, the great wildlife photographer and zoologist. He said to drop to the ground for shots and see the animals at their level. Having a dirty jacket and pants from doing that became a badge of honor throughout the Antarctic trip.
Pamelia was one of the many ground-based shooters.
This chick became particularly fond of her—or at least her boot.
This elephant seal pup wiggled his way more than 20 feet to get within an arm's length of Pamelia as she sat on the ground. The two stared into each other's eyes for several minutes—a pair of mammal cousins from different species and parts of the planet connecting in a way Pamelia will never forget. I should note that at this time in the pups' lives, their mothers have left them to fend for themselves. The pups haven't realized yet that their mothers aren't returning, and seem to crave companionship.
Among those taking in the action in our group of expeditioners was award-winning wildlife filmmaker Peter Bassett (far left), one of David Attenborough's former BBC producers, who was shooting footage throughout the trip.
The penguins and seals coexisted comfortably...
...though the undisputed bosses of the beach were the roaring "beachmaster" male elephant seals. Each weighed between 5,000 and 9,000 pounds—southern elephant seal bulls are easily the heaviest carnivorous mammals on the planet—and ruled a "harem" of up to 100 far smaller females, which weighed one-fifth as much. The beachmasters fiercely defended their turf against other males who tried to sneak in and mate with harem members. Check out all the fight scars on this guy's neck and chest.
This was a typical example of mouth-to-mouth combat. The beachmaster always won.
By contrast, the weaned seal pups—called weaners—were playful...
...and irresistibly cute.
Some pups were still nursing. They would be doubling and tripling and quadrupling in size in a matter of days on milk that is more than 50 percent milk fat, compared to four percent for human mothers' milk. (The mothers can end up losing hundreds of pounds during nursing.)
Nearly all of the seals seemed content to lounge around in the 30-degree sunshine.
Though it was easy to chuckle at the southern elephant seals' loud and frequent vocalizations—most of which sounded like embarrassing human bodily functions—it was sobering to recall that humans hunted them to near-extinction in the 19th century. Their numbers are starting to fall again, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. These majestic animals regularly dive more than half a mile underwater (sometimes more than a mile) and stay submerged for more than 20 minutes when hunting for fish and squid. We looked forward to seeing and studying more of them in the days ahead.
As we neared the six-hour mark, we wended our way carefully around resting beachmaster seals and back to the Zodiacs. The Sergey Vavilov had to move on to our afternoon landing spot on South Georgia, a seal, penguin and albatross breeding site called Gold Harbor. The photos here scarcely do justice to what we had just experienced. We left feeling awed and humbled by the extraordinary animals and the dramatic landscape, which only one in a million humans will ever get to see.
And we weren't even halfway through this astounding day. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
It was hail and farewell to this colony of kings, but our penguin experiences were only beginning to unfold.
Coming next: Glaciers, Gold and why you shouldn't get too close to a male fur seal...
A last view of St. Andrews from the departing Zodiac. Spectacular to the end.
Eight Things to Do If You Hit 30-Foot Waves On the Way to Antarctica
Pamelia and I were heading for one of the wildest and most astounding places on the planet, an island "smack in the middle of nowhere," in the words of our Antarctic expedition organizer, the esteemed British zoologist, conservationist and wildlife photographer Mark Carwardine.
He was speaking not of Antarctica—though he could have been—but of South Georgia Island, the breathtaking Serengeti of Antarctic wildlife. Small (100 miles long), rugged (11 mountains more than 6,500 feet tall, plus glaciers) and uninhabited (except for staff at two small science stations and a post office/museum/British government office located near an abandoned whaling station), South Georgia sits 750 miles from the nearest speck of civilization, the Falkland Islands and more than 1,000 miles from any continent.
To reach South Georgia Island, our Russian oceanographic ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, would travel through 30-foot waves and cross one of the most distinct geographic and climatic boundaries on Earth, the Antarctic convergence. That's where warm ocean waters from the north collide with frigid waters from the bottom of the planet. Weather, animal life and scenery (here come the icebergs!) all abruptly change. It's where the Antarctic truly begins.
But we would not see South Georgia's snowy peaks and many thousands of penguins and seals for two to three days. What would we and our 90-odd fellow expeditioners do while our ship powered its way through roller-coaster seas? A whole lot, as it turned out. I've summed a few in my Top Eight Things to Do in 30-Foot Waves:
1) Photograph the waves to try to show their size. Photos rarely do justice to massive ocean-open swells, but below are a few of our attempts. (Unbeknownst to us, we would be seeing waves almost twice this big—50-footers—later in the trip.)
From the third deck on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov—normally about 15 feet above the water line—we looked up at colossal waves such as this one...
...and these...
...and these...
...and these...
...and oh, yeah, it started to snow heavily. That orange pod is one of the lifeboats, designed to sardine-pack 56 passengers, an adventure we hoped not to experience.
2) Try not to fall off your bed. When a huge wave smacked and heaved the side of the Sergey Vavilov—which is a remarkably stable ship, I should point out, specially designed for polar travel and rough oceans—I would sometimes start to roll off my narrow bunk. I learned to sleep with my arms out as cross-braces, my legs spread wide and my toes hooked over an edge of the bed.
3) Laugh at the adventure. Glasses and bottles tipped over and slid off tables in the dining room. As recounted to us by Roz Kidman Cox, the longtime editor of BBC Wildlife magazine who was on board and writing a diary of the journey, two of our shipmates had their mini-fridge fly out of its cubby and dump milk and red wine throughout their cabin. Another passenger was flung out of the shower while not hanging onto the hand rail. Another was emphatically hand-signaled off the bow of the ship by a Russian crew member who was worried that the next big wave might wash him overboard. Two others failed to fully screw-tighten their cabin porthole and got a cold-water bath. Another, as a solution to the roll-off-the-bed problem, put her mattress on the floor and slept on it there.
I loved the tale told to us by Richard and Sue, a delightful couple from England, of a previous voyage they had taken through rough seas. Richard was tossed across the ship's bar and cut his forehead so severely that it needed stitches. He refused to let Sue, a nurse, do the stitching because he didn't want to yell at his wife if the procedure hurt too much. Instead he recruited a crew member, who stayed up all night practicing his stitch work on a banana—and ultimately handled the procedure so well that Richard doesn't even have a scar.
4) Defy seasickness. Having suffered my whole life from wretched bouts of motion sickness, I prepared for our voyage through the world's most turbulent ocean by bringing an arsenal of anti-sickness weaponry: Bonine tablets; a wristwatch-style device that, when strapped on, shot pulses of electricity into the underside of my wrist; anti-nausea gum; a queasiness-preventing inhaler; and stomach-settling candied ginger. All of those, and my decision to be extra cautious and lie down at the hint of a whisper of approaching nausea, worked.
Bottom line: Never rule out a trip to the Antarctic because you think you'll get seasick. You very well may not. And trust me, the voyage will be worth it even if you do.
5) Try to ignore the waves and attend lectures on the wildlife and places you're about to see. Pamelia and I had been studying the Antarctic for weeks before the trip, but on board we also soaked up the knowledge not only of the renowned Mark Carwardine, who had been to the Antarctic an astounding 23 times, but also of the likes of ornithologist Simon Boyes, entomologist and ecologist Mark Thatchell and award-winning wildlife filmmaker Peter Bassett, who as one of David Attenborough's BBC producers has ended up spending months at a time at places like South Georgia dealing with things like a tent-flooding river of penguin guano and a diet of dried mutton granules (tales he recounts hilariously).
How is the Antarctic defined? Many scientists will tell you it begins not at 66 degrees south latitude (the start of the geographical Antarctic Circle) but at the more northerly and varying line of the convergence, where warm and cold oceans meet, the Antarctic environment starts and the sea becomes richer with churned-up nutrients, feeding a profusion of marine wildlife and birds.
And so en route to South Georgia, even as the ship swayed, we learned about everything from Antarctic photography (much more on that later) to sea birds to the natural history of South Georgia to the story of the ill-fated Endurance voyage led by Ernest Shackleton (whose grave we would visit on South Georgia) to the seal species we would soon encounter to the biology and Earth science of the 20- to 30-mile-wide Antarctic convergence zone, which we slowly angled across.
We couldn't see the warm and cold waters meeting at the convergence, of course, but beneath us the colliding waters were churning up nutrients that would feed countless billions (trillions?) of tiny, shrimp-like krill, on which Antarctic's larger ocean mammals and birds directly or indirectly feast. The water temperature, which had been about 43 degrees Fahrenheit in the Falklands, dropped by 11 degrees F to 32. (Around Antarctica proper, the water is 28 degrees, a sub-freezing temperature it can reach because of its saltiness.)
That's Ernest Shackleton's famously ice-trapped ship, the Endurance. Enriched by the insights of our ship's spellbinding young Scottish historian, Katie Murray, we would in the days ahead be following Shackleton's path, rediscovering his remarkable tale of survival and even seeing his final resting place.
We would see all of these except the Ross seal, which lives closer to the South Pole.
6) Act like a real sailor and scrub your gear. In our case, we had no choice. One Oceans Expeditions is a stickler for "bio-securing" the boots and outer clothing of its voyagers to avoid spreading invasive diseases, plants or animals to any of its Antarctic destinations. We had been scrubbing off anyway before and after each trip ashore, but the time at sea was a good opportunity to bring out not just brushes and disinfectant but also vacuum cleaners, to suck up any stray seeds that might be hiding in the velcro strips on our jacket and pant straps.
Pamelia at the scrubbing station.
7) Be creative. Pamelia takes risks as an artist. Despite the rough seas, she flung our cabin window open, kneeled on my bed and, grabbing materials she had handy, attempted to do some small indigo ink paintings of waves while trying not to fall over. She said they were quick studies (indigo wouldn't have been her color of choice to represent the water) to try to grasp, interact with and record an impression of the incredible ocean moment—AND it was great fun. That was a lesson: When the giant waves come, have fun and get to know them!
"I was aware of what a rare experience this was and wanted to try to know it more," she said afterward. "It was challenging to paint while being jolted by wave action. Sometimes the brushstroke was made by the wave—my hand would involuntarily be jerked and the brush would make marks that I didn't control. I loved the process. Now every time I look at this little painting I'll be brought back to this moment."
Pamelia's sense of artistic adventure matched the wild sea conditions.
This is a study using white ink in a notebook with black paper, for which she had to think in reverse when trying to represent dark and light. In the days ahead Pamelia would be painting and drawing on the ship and on land, producing 30 studies and experimenting with a video component that we'll show you in the days ahead.
8) Think of the amazing sights ahead. "Ships run on two things: diesel fuel and rumors," Boris Wise, the day-to-day expedition leader, told us all during one of our meals at sea. He knew that we adventurers were all speculating on when we might set foot on South Georgia, given the rough ocean conditions and strong winds. We were beyond eager.
And then the sightings began: the first snow petrel, named for its pure whiteness. The first wandering albatrosses, the first gray-headed albatrosses, the first chunks of sea ice and glowing blue icebergs. And then...
...land. The first rocky, snow-capped islands we laid our eyes upon were the Willis Islands, just west of the main island of South Georgia. Then came South Georgia itself, forbidding and gorgeous, its white peaks rising as high as 9,600 feet. Seeing it, even from a distance, while standing in the biting cold wind on a viewing wing off the bridge, we were in awe. South Georgia was spectacular. And we were going to explore it.
Land ho! We were about to embark on four days of exploring South Georgia.
Inhospitable? That's what explorers from Captain Cook on have called it, but the animals living there would turn out to be quite hospitable to us human visitors.
At dinner that night, Boris gave us the good news. Tomorrow there would be a 4 a.m. wakeup call, followed by a quick 4:30 breakfast and a 5:30 departure on Zodiac rafts for South Georgia—specifically the beach at St. Andrews Bay, home to more than 100,000 king penguins, many thousands of elephant seals and the retreating Ross glacier.
We were, to borrow assistant expedition leader Nate Small's phrase from a few days earlier, about to have our minds blown.—Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Coming next: Can you imagine a landscape of penguins and seals as far as you can see?
Look at what's ahead!