Matiu/Somes Island

What a perfect introduction to my new field site, Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington Harbor, at the southern end of the North Island. After a week of working with Jingjing Zhang, DOC (Department of Conservation) staff, and Penguin Project volunteers from Wellington, I’m so grateful to have landed at such an incredible field site, working with such dedicated, knowledgeable and friendly people. The week began as I imagine all of my field weeks will begin here in Wellington, with strong winds, clouds threatening rain (but rarely delivering on the threat), and a stop at a cafe for our last mocha of the week (for the rest of the work week it’s an endless string of tea breaks - ‘putting the kettle on for a cuppa’).

The ferry trip from Wellington to Matiu/Somes Island is a short 8 km. We hop off and go through the biosecurity check to make sure we haven’t inadvertently brought any mice, rats, Argentine ants or seeds from invasive species with us in our luggage. I could of course guarantee the first three species were not hitchhiking in my luggage, but I did have a careful check of my packed clothes and shoes for bits and pieces of plants. The island has been free of mammalian predators since the 80s and the native birds, reptiles and insects would appreciate it if it stayed that way, ensuring their survival.

A Little Blue Penguin returning to its nest at dusk

Matiu (Maori name) / Somes (European name) Island

The view of Wellington from the Education House, the wonderful place we stay on Matiu/Somes Island (and available for public rental from the Department of Conservation)

After a hike uphill to the housing, we head out to the penguin colony and check each nestbox, looking for an adult Little Blue Penguin (Eudyptula minor) with one or two small to medium sized chicks. It’s important to find nests with parents still in the guarding stage, where one parent is home with the chicks each day while the other parent is out fishing. Later in the breeding season, both parents spend their days out fishing and only come home at night to feed their chicks. Once the chicks are larger, they don’t need guarding from predators or warmth from the parents, but they are quite demanding for food. One of the penguin researchers described what his infrared camera recorded one night - a parent came home, fed the chicks quickly (within 5 minutes) and left the box, only to nap outside of the box for 3 hours before heading out to sea to collect more fish. The boxes can get very stinky and chicks can pester their parents, so I'm sure a little peace and quiet was just what that parent needed.

A Little Blue Penguin chick losing its warm down and growing in waterproof feathers. Notice that chicks have brighter blue feathers than the steel blue feathers of adults.

The GPS receiver (larger, to the right) and the TDR (temperature-depth recorder, smaller, to the left), duct-taped on to the back of an adult Little Blue Penguin.

Jingjing has been attaching GPS receivers to penguins to track their foraging behavior. On her previous trip to Matiu/Somes, the four penguins she tracked either foraged inside the harbor or went through the entrance, around Pencarrow Head, and foraged near the outflows of two rivers. On this trip and our subsequent trip, Jingjing attached 12 GPS receivers ($100 each) and six Temperature-Depth Recorders (TDRs - $1000 each) to penguins while I held them as steady as possible. Each penguin has its own personality - some were quite feisty while others were content to just sit quietly in my lap while Jingjing taped the transmitters on. She uses small strips of black duct tape (the many uses of duct tape - who knew this is one of them?!). The advantage of duct tape is that it’s easy to take off when they return to the nestbox and the transmitter will just fall off if we don’t retrieve the bird within 3 days, minimizing the impact on actively feeding adults.

Jingjing Zhang and Mike Rumble record the weight of a penguin in a pillowcase. The nestbox behind Mike is a secure, dry home with a stunning view atop the northern end of the island.

Little bundles of joy.

Wellington as viewed through a rock arch on North Point.

We also help the Penguin Project volunteers record the activity and occupants of each nestbox in the north end study colonies, as well as capture and record the identification and weight of penguins returning to their nests just after dark. While walking back to our house after night work, we spotted an adult walking up the road near the top. It’s amazing to me how far (and up!) these penguins go to get to their nests after a long day of swimming. At the beginning of the breeding season, new breeders do some creative scouting for potential nest sites. One of the island’s rangers said she once had two Little Blues walk right into her house and head right for the bedroom. A nice, cozy place to raise a family. Some people here in New Zealand have penguins nesting under their houses, to varying levels of enthusiasm. They can be noisy and odorous so I’m sure some people consider them pests. For five summers while doing field work at Kent Island, New Brunswick, I lived in a boathouse with a semi-open lower level which housed several Barn Swallow nests - quite chatty in the pre-dawn hours. On most days I was happy to share the house with them and I miss the experience of living there.

Jingjing Zhang with a Giant Weta.

The female Giant Weta is on top - her ovipositor is the long, pointy structure pointing to the left. The baitbox sometimes serves as a weta hotel. The peanut butter flavored block is visible at the end of the orange platform and the poison is the green block in the plastic bag. Without these boxes, the island could become infested with rodents again and native wildlife would disappear as their young were devoured.

This medium-sized Brother's Island tuatara (Sphenodon guntheri) was reliably basking near the hiking trail on sunny days. I caught a quick glimpse of a large tuatara near one of the colony paths on an especially warm afternoon. Tuatara only exist on New Zealand's predator-free islands. I was very excited to see this unusual species with ancestors dating back some 200 million years.

On one of our trips, we checked the bait boxes to make sure that mice and rats are still absent from the island. Each box has a small block of poison in a plastic bag and a peanut butter flavored block. We note the gnawing pattern on the peanut butter block - so far only weta. The poison is untouched and because it's in a thin plastic bag, it doesn't harm the weta or geckos that sometimes use the boxes as dry hotels. A mouse or rat would chew right through the bag and eat some of the poison, limiting the infestation. Because mice and rats eat ground-nesting birds' eggs and chicks, maintaining the island as predator-free is crucial to the existence of the native species, including insects, geckos, and the tuatara.

Gollum, fishing inside the Wellington airport. I joined the many travelers standing in the middle of pedestrian traffic to take pictures of this enormous sculpture.

Wellington is the Middle of Middle Earth (and the site of the creative force behind the The Lord of the Rings movies and now, The Hobbit trilogy. Sir Peter Jackson himself makes an appearance in the Air New Zealand safety video.

Traveling to Wellington has been fun this past month with the world premiere of The Hobbit in late November and the broad release today. The airport is all decked out with Hobbit icons and Air New Zealand has a great safety video that I watch attentively every time! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc

Aotearoa

Aotearoa. Land of the long white cloud. I have been living in Auckland, New Zealand now for almost two months. It's wonderful. I arrived three months early for my Fulbright Scholar Award to begin field work on Little Blue Penguins. I'm working with Dr. Todd Dennis and his PhD student Jingjing Zhang on a colony of blues at Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington Harbor. When I arrived in Auckland October 22, I didn't yet have a place to live but I had spotted my dream house on the NZ Real Estate website. I'd been tracking it for weeks and was a little concerned that no one had snapped it up when it was so clearly paradise. Knowing enough about how pictures and descriptions can make a place look much more attractive than it is, I didn't want to commit to it until I saw the competition in person. The best place I saw in the CBD (central business district, an easy walk to the University of Auckland campus where I am based) was attractively furnished on a high floor with a partial view of a park. It also had a partial view of the neighboring building and was 40m2. I didn't really have an appreciation for square footage (meterage in this case) before apartment shopping. I felt like I was bumping into myself. I'm pretty sure my closets and bathroom back home are more spacious than that little apt, and they're not big. There is pressure to build more housing in the CBD and these dog-boxes (as I heard them called) will be more common.

Suffice it to say that I'm living in my dream place across from the CBD with tremendous views of everything. I'm actually quite the cliff-side spy with my long lens camera and binoculars, watching every bird and sailboat that flies by, as well as the considerable commerce going on: container ships, huge cruise ships, ferries to numerous islands in the gulf, fishing charters, and superyachts being field tested by boat-building companies in Auckland.

View of sunrise and the NZ Navy station (left) from my living room.

Christmas colors on the Skytower, Auckland CBD.

Ohana superyacht, 164ft, FitzroyYachts. The Auckland Museum is on the hill in the background.

This is one of my favorite sailboats. Beautiful lines and sails. 

Ethereal superyacht, $60 million, 190ft, Ron Holland (NZ) eco-design

Sun Princess. 2-3 cruise ships per week dock at Princes Wharf.

I was lucky enough to see a pod of orcas swim by. I had just seen them on the local news. They were at a nearby beach eating sting rays in the shallows. One orca even had the long stinger dangling out of its mouth. My neighbor clued me in to their presence essentially in our front yard by jumping the hedge and knocking on my sliding glass door. I happened to have my computer in front of me, focused on writing a letter of recommendation, so I missed the telltale sign of whales in the harbor: ferries going in circles to make sure the passengers get a good look (probably the only time the ferries aren't right on time to the second as they usually are).

I don't have a car. I commute to work by walking 10 minutes to the Stanley Bay ferry, then going across the narrow strip of water separating me from the CBD (7 minutes), then walking uphill through beautiful Albert Park to the university. No traffic jams, no buying gas (NZ$2.21 per liter which is about US$7.30 per gallon!), and I get some much needed exercise. Good stuff.

During my commute on a particularly windy day I had the chance to document a capsized catamaran, the Ninja. See the Bugger! post. I also have watched the America's Cup super-catamarans: the Kiwi entry and Luna Rossa, the gorgeous Prada sponsored Italian boat, made to the same specs as the Kiwi boat and here to race with a top competitor for training. The December issue of the Auckland magazine Metro has a phenomenal picture (1st one at link below) of the Kiwi 72 (feet long) with BOTH hulls out of the water, grounded only by a curved dagger board. Stunning. The article is interesting too. Additional pics here. I really want to go to the America's Cup next year in San Francisco to see them push these cats to the very limit. These boats absolutely fly.

Emirates Team New Zealand AC72

The Luna Rossa AC72. This picture was taken January 22, 2013 - finally got one of it flying by. Gorgeous.

Another  pic (taken with my iPad) of the gorgeous Luna Rossa. I watched for about an hour as it was lifted by a crane and tucked into its shed at the end of Silo Park. 

On January 15, 2013 the training catamaran for the Italian team lost the lower half of  its wing in high winds. A small tending skiff towed the floating wing back to the storage shed while the larger skiff here towed the cat back. Luckily they were still able to train on the full-sized cat (see above - flying shot). 

Patagonia

My last day of birding at the Fin del Mundo on the Isla de Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia, Argentina is tomorrow. It’s going to be difficult to top all of the species I’ve seen so far over the last month. Today was very special with two Chilean Flamingoes feeding in a laguna on Estancia de Los Flamencos. So far I’ve seen 81 species of birds on this island – not a huge number but many of them are very specific to this area like the Magellanic Plover, the only member of its family and with a limited distribution. We were blown sideways in 50-60 mph Patagonian winds trying to locate this special plover on the shores of a lagoon when we spotted the two flamingoes – gorgeous! My photos are less than sharp because not only was it impossible to hold my 300mm lens steady, I kept having to step forward to avoid being blown over. There were moments on the way back to the van that the wind stopped me and I literally couldn’t step forward it was so strong. I felt like I was at the top of a mountain in the middle of the jet stream. Yet the flamingoes held their ground and the Baird’s Sandpipers on the shore managed to fly from here to there so perhaps the winds weren’t quite the hurricane strength I perceived.

In contrast to the localized plover we found at the lagoon next to the flamingoes’ lagoon, the sandpipers (Baird’s and White-rumped), Sanderlings, Red Knots, Black-bellied Plovers, and Hudsonian Godwits we saw at the high tide line on the Atlantic coast are all long-distance migrants. Some of them breed even farther north in the Arctic than the north slope of Alaska where I found shorebird nests at Prudhoe Bay back in the early 90s as a field tech by day and as a PhD student studying shorebirds by night (always light). It’s mind boggling to imagine the same individual Arctic Terns, Baird’s Sandpipers, and Black-bellied Plovers I’ve seen on this trip breeding in Alaska in a few months.

We’re staying at the Kaiken Hosteria at the west end of Lake Fagnano, a long lake that nearly splits the island in half. The island is split in half in the other direction with the west portion belonging to Chile and the east portion belonging to Argentina. It’s a strained relationship between the two neighbors, almost as if they don’t really want to be roommates, but they have to be. When our captain radioed the Chilean authorities to ask if we could approach Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America and part of Chile, closer than 3 miles so we could see the wildlife closer to land, he was told that 3 miles was the limit. Only a few ships are allowed to take the shortcut back to Ushuaia through Chilean waters after rounding Cape Horn. Our ship is not one of those ships so we go east to the entrance of the Beagle Channel, then west through the channel. We docked at 630am and our rooms were being cleaned while we were at breakfast and we disembarked at 745am. Unbelievably, our ship was heading right back across the Drake Passage to Antarctica for 10 days and leaving at 4pm the same day we landed!! And get this, the next set of passengers is not composed of mainly senior world travelers but rather 50 (50!) 10-15 year old Chinese kids and their teachers! The kids are apparently rewarded for their exceptional performance in school by going on a trip to Antarctica. My grade school sure wasn’t like that. I’m sure they’ll all be very well behaved if they earned this trip, but I can’t imagine a more different experience than the one I had.

Fast forward: just arrived at my hotel in Buenos Aires at 2am. At least I get late checkout waiting for my 10pm flight home. I haven’t downloaded any of my pictures from the Tierra del Fuego birding trip but these two are both representative of what I saw (took them on the pre-birding trip). We had even better views of a male (pictured) and female Magellanic Woodpecker today but of course I didn’t take my camera on that short walk. Silly me. But I DID have it for a pretty crazy stop on the way to the airport – just as we were leaving the national park. Eagle-eyed Willene spotted a beaver in the marsh. We parked, ran across the road, looked, ran back to the van (hi, camera!!), and snapped great pics of this industrious animal chewing off a branch of an Antarctic Beech, and dragging, then swimming with it, over to a hole in the bank. I’ve never seen a beaver before and we all chuckled when I told people that I’m from Oregon, the Beaver State, with a beaver on the state flag, and I’ve never seen one. So now I’ve seen an introduced species to Patagonia, one that they’d like to get rid of because it kills trees when they flood from beaver dams and alter the habitat. More lifers today as well – we saw everything we tried to find and spent all day walking around the Tierra del Fuego National Park on a gorgeous t-shirt weather day. This has certainly been a trip I will never forget and I’m sure I’ll be back again to add to these memories and experiences.

PS – now that I’m off the ship, my pictures are as they should be! I’ll replace the others when I get a chance.

Deception Island and Hannah Point on Livingston Island

How can this trip be nearly over? Although I’m ready to go home, I’ll miss so many things from this experience: 1) Doug’s enthusiastic announcements using Swahili, Hawaiian, and Fantastic!!! He and his wife Gail have led 66 trips to Tanzania and Kenya in the last 30 years and they have a house in Hawaii, 2) The landings at colonies of penguins and seals nearly everyday, 3) The incredible scenery everywhere you look, 4) The wonderful friends I’ve made, 5) Having everything done for you – no cooking, no dishes, no laundry.

Our last day is spent like so many of our days, fully booked. We begin the morning at Bailey Head, a beautiful rocky point bordering a volcanic black sand beach, on the outer portion of Deception Island. The inner portion is a water-filled caldera of this active volcano, steam streaming at the water’s edge. Bailey Head is known for its 100,000 strong Chinstrap Penguin colony, scattered in numerous colonies in a punchbowl-shaped area strewn with rounded hillsides. I spend my first hour standing at the surf’s edge (and sometimes knee deep in the surf in my knee rubber boots covered by rain pants), watching and photographing the penguins go into the water and crowd at the edge. Mesmerizing.

I take a few steps up to the top of the beach and record the penguin highway. As they come from the ocean, they walk up the right side of the broad path. The others heading to the ocean are on the left side, just like American drivers. From high on a hill overlooking the activities, it looks just like a Grand Central Station populated by penguins. I wonder over to the edge of a colony and watch parents display to each other while their two chicks either flop out on the ground, or beg food from their parents. There are neighborhood squabbles, some of them appearing to be particularly feisty. The scenery is stunning with moss covered hills situated below a massive glacier covered in black ash. We are reminded that this is the most dangerous part of our journey because we are cruising into the caldera of an active volcano.

About 20 passengers take part in a polar hot springs swim. They Zodiac to the edge of Whaler’s Bay where the steam seems to be rising the most. I initially thought I would go too but since I can barely go outside to take pictures without having all of my layers on, I decide to stay on the ship. It’s great fun watching the beach-goers strip down to their swimsuits, enter the warm edge of the water with a tentative look, then after about 4 steps when they hit cold water and a drop off, their faces turn to an agonized look, quickly making a retreat back to belly flop on the warm sand at the water’s edge, posting for pictures taken by others who wanted to watch the scene from a closer vantage point.

Our third stop of the day, and final landing of the trip, is Hannah Point on Livingston Island, one of the Shetland Islands. This place is quite diverse with both species of Antarctica’s flowering plants (!), breeding Kelp Gulls, South Polar Skuas, Southern Giant Petrels, Chinstrap and Gentoo Penguins, and the stinkiest wallow of Elephant Seals. I mainly sit on a comfortable rock step near a crèche of Gentoo Penguin chicks. Now that they are almost the same size as their parents, mom and dad are starting to limit the food they give them as the chicks prepare for fledging. Chick chases are common when a chick spots one of its parents coming up the slope, then runs towards the adult and chases him throughout the colony trying to get food. Sometimes the parent gives in and feeds the chick, but other times the parent keeps pecking the chick’s neck in an effort to stop the begging. The chicks seem to do most of the behaviors the adults do, including the ecstatic display with their bills pointed skyward, wings out, and braying phrases shouted out. As it begins to snow, I head back to the ship and warm up in a hot shower. Later that evening, we see the last few rocky stacks ringing Snow Island and begin our crossing of the Drake Passage. It’s supposed to be a bit rocky but not as bad as our previous crossing so I’m hopeful that I won’t get sick again.

Now we’re into the at-sea lecture stage of the trip. Today I learn about many of the special species of Tanzania and Kenya. Doug and Gail are leading a trip there right after they return from this trip. I’ll be joining them on one of their African safaris soon. Although this is Doug’s last Antarctica trip, he says he’ll do the African trips until he’s no longer able to do so. I admire the Cheesemans, their staff, and this group of passengers so much. It really has been an incredible trip and it sounds like the seasoned travelers to Antarctica and the staff all think this has been one of the best trips they’ve been on. I agree and look forward to my next trip with this group.

Next up: Cape Horn, the Beagle Channel, and finishing the trip with two days of birding Tierra del Fuego.

Port Lockroy

After our long day going through the Lemaire Channel, we head back north to Port Lockroy and anchor in the protected calm waters at 2am. The plan for the morning is to visit the British former atmospheric research site and current historical museum, gift shop and post office. The visitor limit to the tiny building is 60 people so the other portion of the ship goes to another Gentoo Penguin colony in the bay while waiting their turn to visit Port Lockroy.

After getting a few items at gift shop, I step outside to a sunny calm day and watch the chicks being fed right outside the doorstep. As mentioned in our briefing by British staff, the penguins would nest inside the buildings too if they were given permission. The British Antarctic Survey is doing a study to see if the colony on the tourist side of this footprint of an island are habituated and have the same reproductive success as the off-limits colony out of view. So far, so good – having large numbers of people come by and stare at you from 5’ away (they nest right next to the path) doesn’t disrupt their breeding season.

I was reluctant to leave and took the last Zodiac back to the ship. Then we went through the Peltiere Channel, a narrow, rarely traversed area with a view of the Lemaire Channel in the distance, then looped back north on the beautiful Neumayer Channel. We’ve only seen three cruise ships, three research or military ships, and four sailboats on our journey, so most of the time we feel like we have this entire area to ourselves. Visits to each of the sites are reserved the previous summer in a special agreement by all of the tour operators to ensure a special experience for all of the visitors.

The lack of sleep has finally caught up to me so after leaving the most stunning areas, I head back down to my room for a nap. I must’ve been exceptionally tired because normally my little iPod cricket alarm wakes me up. It turns out I slept right through two announcements over the speaker system that there were Orcas up ahead. My first knowledge of this was when the marine mammologist on board happened to mention it to someone she met in the hallway outside my room – 50 whales, super cool, you have to go up to the bridge to see them. I zip right up to the bridge just in time to hear everyone gushing about what an amazing experience it was and how the Orcas seemed to be at play, swimming right under the bow multiple times. Ted thanked the captain for handling the ship so well to enable everyone a great view without chasing the Orcas. Arrrgggh!! How could I miss this??!! Arthur Morris, a professional photographer, showed me his amazing photos that either made it worse (again, how did I sleep through this) or better (those are gorgeous photos of the whales).

The next day, we awake in Cierva Cove site of the Primavera Argentinian base. They are conducting hydro-acoustic research and radio to us to please not go too fast in our Zodiacs. As it turns out, we mainly putter or have the engines off as two humpback whales feed at the surface all around our boats for about 90 minutes. The running joke in our boat was that as soon as I put my long lens camera in my dry back in preparation for relocating to the shore of a Chinstrap Penguin colony, a whale would come and blow right next to our boat. That happened about 5 times! Finally we all depart for different corners of the bay. We concentrate on the penguins jumping to and from the water and porpoising in flocks (pods?) all around us. As we head in, it begins to snow, something we’ve seen nearly every day on the Peninsula.

The morning at Ciera Cove was spent moving slowly through the heavy brash ice to explore different shapes and colors of icebergs, while stopping by to photograph Leopard Seals and Crabeater Seals as we encountered them. Their sleepiness reminds me of me sleeping right through the Orcas. Some of the seals don’t wake up as we quietly motor around them, camera shutters and focus beeps sounding nearly non-stop.

PS – Today’s photos are really for the previous blog – Lemaire Channel, sunset from Booth Island, yawning Leopard Seal, and Gentoo Penguins with a high mountain behind them on Booth Island.

The Lemaire Channel in Brilliant Sunlight and an Antarctic Sunset at 65°S

Just when it seems like the previous best-day-ever can’t be topped, it’s shoved aside by the 24 hours that just ended with my first ever Antarctic sunset. The first jaw-dropping moment was as we cruised into Neko Harbour, a sight unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The water looks like black glass interrupted by icebergs, bergy bits, and brash ice. This is our first absolutely still night and the temperature is cold enough that grease ice is forming, creating a surface of something other than water or recognizable ice. I stand on the bridge so mesmerized by the experience of viewing the water and the craggy black rock and thick white glaciers rising steeply from the surface that by the time I remember to run to my room and get a camera, the effect is spoiled by the Zodiacs already in the water tracing rippled paths to the landing site.

It’s time to gear up for an evening (8-10pm) Zodiac cruise among the blue sculpted icebergs and seals hauled out on the ice. We drop off a passenger on shore and a couple asks if they can jump out on the cobbled shore, then jump back in for the cruise because this is our one and only continental Antarctica landing – all of our other landings this entire month are on islands. Because we’re anchored here for the night, I know I will set foot on the continent during the next morning’s landing so I stay in the Zodiac. We visit three icebergs. Two of them have Weddell Seals on them, occasionally tipping their heads up, neck skin draping into Shar Pei-like folds while oversize eyes peer at us. These are the most endearing of the three common seal species we see everyday now. After we had our fill of the resting seals, we headed over to a spaceship-shaped double iceberg with the purest blues and greens illuminated by the evening light. We must have made a dozen passes at slightly different angles and distances to get every possible shot before working our way slowly back through the ice towards the ship. As we approach the gangway, passengers on the Zodiac in front of us returning from a cruise ask if they can first go to land quickly to set foot on the continent just in case the weather takes a turn for the worse over night. We beg our Zodiac driver to do the same, and since our driver is the owner of the company, the always smiling and enthusiastic 74-year-old Doug Cheeseman, off we go to jump ashore, snap pics of each other, and zip back for 5 hours of sleep before the longest day of the trip, both in terms of daylight and activities planned.  

The 530am wake-up call comes too early for all of us but few miss the chance to explore the Gentoo Penguin colony spreading out up the hillside. I’m not in the mood to photograph penguins this morning – I’d rather watch their behavior for awhile without any concern for lighting, background, and composition.

The cloudy morning breaks open to sunshine very slowly, to the point where one of the passengers on his 9^th trip to Antarctica and I grumble about the new plan to stop outside the Lemaire Channel while we eat lunch, then go through. We think the tentative sunshine will disappear so we want to skip lunch altogether and go through the channel right now so we don’t miss anything. As usual, when Ted makes an alteration to the day’s schedule, we have a much better experience. The remaining clouds evaporate during lunch and we are treated to one of the most spectacular views through the most sought-after passage in Antarctica. Everyone has all of their gear on, shooting scenes from every possible angle. The channel is quite narrow and multiple huge peaks rise directly above us, giving the effect of being high in the Swiss Alps even though we’re at sea level. As we continue south, the sea ice thickens into flat pancakes, with seals almost always visible napping on them. The two species we see the most are Crabeater Seals and Leopard Seals, with Leopards outnumbering Crabeaters (so named because they eat krill – small crustaceans related to crabs). The Leopard Seals also eat a lot of krill but they are famous for being stealthy predators of penguins. They shake the penguin out of its skin leaving only the exterior of the penguin and its neck vertebrae and skull. My friend commented that he could tell resting Leopard Seals from Crabeater Seals because the Leopard Seals always have bloody bits of meat on their ice beds. Up close, Leopard Seals have a snake-like smile and large canines, but their premolars and molars are the same tri-point formation as the Crabeater Seals’ teeth for sieving krill.

We reach the furthest point south of our trip at Petermann Island, 65° 10’ S latitude, just outside the Antarctic Circle. We likely could have made use of the icebreaker strength of our vessel to continue since the sea ice completely covered the water’s surface, but instead we turned around and made our way to the other side of Booth Island (which forms one half of the Lemaire Channel’s walls).

After dinner, it was time for either a sunset Zodiac cruise or a landing at a Gentoo and Chinstrap Penguin colony. I opted for the landing. The late evening light and variety of penguins with chicks afforded great viewing and photography. As we were being rounded up for the last boat back to the ship at 11pm, I lingered to watch my first, and possibly last, Antarctic sunset.

PS – no Lemaire Channel pictures for this posting because I haven’t downloaded them yet! I’ve filled my laptop’s hard drive and only the generosity of other passengers in lending memory cards and back-up space on hard drives is guaranteeing space for my pictures. Of course this only delays the heavy editing until later but I’d rather shoot now and edit during the Drake Passage. I grossly underestimated how much memory I would go through and I’m on the low side in comparison to others.