300,000 King Penguins, Gorgeous Mountains, Glaciers, Sun, and Wind

St. Andrews Bay. The largest King Penguin colony in the world. I got out on the first Zodiac and trailed behind one of the several professional photographers on this trip to the ridge above the colony. It really is an amazing sight to see so many penguins stretching to the glacier on the far side of the beach. They seemed to be in one of three phases: 1) courting (and copulating – one of the guides told us all to look behind us as we were staring in awe at the masses below us – a couple of penguins were just in the act, horizontal in case you were wondering, when along comes another penguin to interrupt…); 2) chick stage – called the oakum boys, standing in groups or solo with their brown fuzzy feathers; and 3) egg incubation, skin folded over the egg on their feet, spaced just out of pecking range from the other incubating parents.

After waiting forever, and making about 10 short video clips to no avail, I saw the beginning of an egg exchange, but not the actual egg exchange. The incubating bird would show the egg, point to it, then the other bird got interested and they’d turn towards each other ready to transfer the egg over, but stop, sit for quite some time longer, then tease us all again. After 40 minutes of this, I decided to give up and track down other behaviors. Thirty minutes later people came over and said they finally got that egg exchange on video. It’s a major deal for the parents as shown at today’s colony (at Gold Harbor) when the egg was not exchanged well and rolled away from both parents. A Brown Skua swooped in immediately and tried to peck the egg. Both parents pointed their bills aggressively at the skua, keeping it at bay until the incubating bird could roll the egg back under its skin flap. They still needed to do an exchange, but at least their egg survived that mishap.

I saw some of the professionals down at a little spit in the middle of a glacial melt pond so I made my way down there. I’m sure glad I did because it was probably my best experience of the entire trip. I got down low on the ground to get a shot of the penguins and the mountains, which had cleared nicely after the morning’s rainy start. Pretty soon, curious penguins, and skuas, started to investigate me.

A skua pecked at my boot, probably checking to see if this new body in its territory could provide any food. I’m not sure that was the same motivation for the penguins since they eat while swimming after krill and small fish. I offered my sunglasses to one penguin, thinking that was as close as I had to a beak and somewhat expendable if he destroyed them (I brought two pair on the trip). He pecked at it but mainly seemed to want to hang around me. I had so much fun trading cameras (my 70-300mm and my 18-50mm) and getting shots of them from the ground.

St. Andrews Bay, South Georgia Island. King Penguins investigating me. Taken by Pablo Fernicola.

While I was on the ground, I felt a sudden gust of wind, especially noticeable because the day was otherwise remarkably calm. We’d been warned about the sudden winds that developed over the mountains and swooped down the valleys to our location. On a previous trip, they had to evacuate everyone quickly because the winds whipped up to 100mph gusts in a matter of 30 minutes. In fact, the captain made the call to stop running Zodiacs on that trip with 28 people still onshore. They huddled together in a small research shack at the end of the beach for 11 hours with barely any food and water between them. I sure didn’t want this to happen to me so I got right up and my baseball cap blew off (I didn’t have it cinched as tight as I normally do for windy conditions). After retrieving it in the pond (it’s from O’Reilly’s Rainforest Guesthouse in Australia – not losing it!), those of us still out there hustled up the hill and over to the landing area. At 30mph, the winds weren’t quite enough to concern the crew so we just ate lunch and went back to the ship on a normal schedule with many others still staying on land to continue watching the wildlife. I was happy to be on board and not worry about even more wind kicking up and watched the changing mountain views and clouds from the 8^th deck of the ship (on top of the bridge, 360° view). What a wonderful day.