South Georgia Island
Macaroni Penguin, Cooper Bay: 54° 47.1’ S., 35° 48.4’ W.
King Penguins, St. Andrew’s Bay: 54° 26.2’ S., 36° 10.7’ W
Today was busy as we worked hard to see and experience as much of South Georgia Island as possible during the ever-shortening daylight hours. It began with a pre-breakfast outing at the southern tip of South Georgia in Cooper Bay. We scampered out of the Zodiacs and immediately scaled a steep hillside through worn tussock grass and then turned down an ambush alley of fur seals to reach the fringes of a macaroni penguin colony. The shoulder-high tussock hid the diminutive penguins until we were almost upon them but the noise and the smells reaching our senses served as a descriptive preview. Hundreds of adult macaronis were crowded like conventioneers into the muddy alleyways threading between the bright green tussock stools. Each bird’s fiery yellow crests converged in a point above a razor red bill, giving it a severe countenance accentuated by garnet-red eyes. Not tempted in the least to move in with them, we marveled at the bustling community of young and old alike and then headed back to the ship to fortify ourselves with breakfast.
The third stop of the day landed us on the beach at St. Andrew’s Bay, home to almost 100,000 king penguins and, to our dismay (although by now we are getting used to them), hundreds of Antarctic fur seals too. Even after our second outing at Gold Harbour, with its sizeable entourage of kings, we were not prepared for the ever-unfolding scene of white, black, steel-blue, and crimson orange bodies covering every meter of beach at St. Andrew’s Bay. The best way to take it all in was to hike along the beach to a low hill and gaze down up a melt-water torrent from nearby glaciers that neatly divided the colony in half. This photo, taken further inland from that vantage point, shows primarily non-breeding adults lounging in the quieter reaches of the stream. Amazingly there were reindeer as well, grazing in the hinterlands beyond the colony. They are descendants of a herd introduced to South Georgia Island as a source of meat and sport by whalers in 1911.
