Carcass Island & New Island, Falklands
Wind lurks around the Falklands like a panhandler near an ATM, but today it followed us around and pulled on our coats, insistently. We began the morning at Carcass Island (named after a ship, the HMS Carcass) where we were welcomed by the McGill family.
The island is one of the few in the archipelago that has escaped the scourge of introduced rats, and it is therefore teeming with songbirds like Cobb’s wren and tussac birds. These species have been extripated from islands where this wily rodent has found its way ashore. Waterfowl is plentiful here, too, and we found upland geese and flightless steamer ducks cruising our landing site with their chicks. But on a morning as windy and wet as this one, the most popular attraction of all was probably the splendid tea and cakes served inside the McGill’s house.
In a rising westerly wind, we shifted our attentions to New Island, the westernmost in the Falklands. Here, in a relatively protected harbour, we landed on a sandy beach crowded with quarrelsome kelp geese. A gentle hike across the island brought us to a spell-binding conglomeration of seabirds. Black-browed albatrosses, rockhopper penguins, and blue-eyes cormorants all crowded into a compact arena at the top of a crumbly, stratified cliff, with each species ignoring the others while getting on with the business of breeding.
The ride back to the ship was our final Zodiac excursion. After 3 weeks of climbing in and our of these sturdy craft, most of us will miss them, and the magical places they took us.
