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| On clear days like this I don't think I've ever seen such a perfect shade of blue. |
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| The angle's off a bit here but I was in a Zodiac at the time. |
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| A glittering field of brash ice. |
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| It was relatively warm and the penguin chicks were using ice to cool down. |
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| Until their adult feathers grow, they're unable to cool off by going for a swim. |
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| A stream cuts through the beach. |
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| A skua takes a bath. |
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| Dinner time! |
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| Like cats with boxes, penguins do enjoy standing on rocks. |
It's another beautiful day in Antarctica and look - more penguins! Time for a primer on the types of penguins found on the peninsula.
There are five species of penguin found in the Antarctic Peninsula: Adélie; Chinstrap; Emperor; Gentoo; Macaroni. Emperors are only found on the Ross Sea side of the peninsula and much further south than we will be going on our side. Adélies tend to be further south too and I didn't see any. It wouldn't be impossible to see some, but as the seas on this side have warmed, they have moved further south and been replaced by gentoos. Of the three remaining, I didn't see any macaronis either despite later going somewhere they are supposed to be. That left chinstraps and gentoos, the only penguins in my photos.
Adélies are small with black beaks and white circles around their eyes that make them look somewhat manic. They were until this trip my favourite penguins. They are named after Adélie Land, one of the many parts of Antarctica where they live. This is in turn named after Adèle Dumont d'Urville, the wife of French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, who discovered the land and its penguins in 1840.
Chinstraps are a touch shorter than adélies. They also have black beaks, but instead of the circles around their eyes, their whole face is white with a thin black border underneath, giving them their name.
Emperors are what happens when you have to compromise between having a penguin or a tank. They are huge, reaching a metre in height and weighing more than the Aerolíneas Argentinas baggage allowance. These, along with their smaller relatives the king penguins, are probably what most people imagine when they think of penguins. Their name very much suggests that nobody was expecting to find any bigger penguins. In fact a larger, long-extinct ancestor has been trussed up with the less imaginative name of 'mega penguin'. I can only wonder whether I will live long enough for archaeologists to discover the giga penguin.
Gentoos are bigger than adélies and are the biggest after kings, although there's quite a leap between them. They lack the markings around their eyes and have red beaks. I have to say that after many hours of careful assessment that they are my new favourite penguins. Sorry adélies, you should have shown up. Intriguingly, nobody knows how they got their name. Most theories are linguistic and cultural wrangling, but my favourite is that it’s a corruption of 'Johnny Penguin', which is another name for the bird. The Spanish equivalent of Johnny, Juanito sounds a bit like gentoo. I mean, maybe? The main point here is that we should be calling them all Johnny Penguin.
Macaronis are about the same size as adélies. They also lack the eye markings and have red beaks, and very distinctively they have a yellow crest of feathers from which they get their name. However they aren't directly named after the pasta macaroni, as much as their crests may resemble it. Instead they were named after the proto-dandyish fashion of the time, which involved bouffant hair and wigs. That fashion was however named after the pasta, but not because it looked like it. Young men undertaking the Grand Tour developed a taste for macaroni in Italy, and it became said that they had joined the macaroni club.
The ship had a library of sorts so you could read up on penguins in-situ if you liked. I'd already done my homework, so I browsed rather than read in earnest. The library was a set of bookshelves at the end of a coffee area that stretched along the starboard side of the ship. Tea and coffee was always available and little scones and cakes arrived mid-afternoon just to keep your calorie intake up in the dangerous after-lunch lull.
The library was quite well-stocked with a wide if somewhat uncurated selection of books and journals. I read a children's book about Mrs Chippy, a cat that the carpenter Harry "Chippy" McNish took with him on Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It was about my level when killing time between Zodiac expeditions, plus I wanted to see how the author handled the, er, reality of the ending. They dodged it pretty well. Then I mostly flipped through large, glossy hardbacks, looking at the pictures. Most of my time in this oddly liminal library which ran between the bar and dining room was spent gazing out of the window at whatever happened to be outside. Occasionally there would be excitement as a whale surfaces alongside, but I was mostly hoping to see Johnny Penguin porpoising to wherever the hell he was going.
I did skim through some wordier tomes, scanning for interesting titbits. Here are a couple that particularly delighted me.
"Five men from the Dundee whaler Balaena tried to overcome an emperor penguin without harming it and to hold it down on the ice. They were quite unequal to the task and were bowled over like ninepins. Eventually, they succeeded in strapping two leather belts around the bird's body, and standing back, they took a breath. So did the penguin - and burst the belts. The capable creature was finally secured with a rope, but when hoisted on board, it knocked out the ship's dog with a blow of its flipper."
- From Oceanic Birds of South America by Robert Cushman Murphy
"Our next port of call was Cape Royds, the Shackleton winter quarters, where Campbell, Levick, and myself had stayed for the third week in January, and where we had left a depôt of geological specimens which we had collected in the neighbourhood. An hour or so after leaving Cape Evans, therefore, the Terra Nova hove to off Flagstaff Point, the seaward edge of the peninsula, a boat was lowered, and Campbell took a party ashore. The landing was easily effected, as there was little swell in the cove at the Rookery and the specimens were easily embarked. The chief difficulty, however, which presented itself, was that of keeping the boat clear of the penguins. As we lay alongside the icefoot we effectively blocked all access to the Rookery, but this did not seem to deter the penguins in the least. They would rise out of the water a few yards off as usual, take a glance at the boat, which they doubtless took for a stranded floe, and then disappear. From previous experience I knew what was coming and looked with interest for the dénouement, but the boat-keeper who was helping me to get the specimens on board was new to the vagaries of the Adélie, and I should not like to say who was the most surprised, the sailor or the penguins, when the latter landed half a dozen at a time upright in the bottom of the boat. Certainly the penguins were most annoyed, and directly they found they were trapped they assaulted the poor man with unreasoning fury, so that it was quite difficult to secure them and pitch them back into the sea. It was on a somewhat similar occasion to this that an Adélie, seeing what he thought was a handy piece of ice for a rest, leaped out of the water and landed on the knees of the boatswain who was in the stern. He looked the man in the face once, gave one hysterical squawk of horror, and leaped back over the gunwale into the sea. If only a snap could have been obtained of the incident, it would have been invaluable as a study of facial expression, for I have never seen any one's face show sheer stupefying astonishment better than that of our respected boatswain, unless it were the penguin's."
- From Antarctic Adventure - Scott's Northern Party by Raymond E Priestly
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