Antarctica: Second and Third Gentoo Penguin Colonies

 

On this day, we visited two different Gentoo penguin colonies. There were penguin chicks with almost every parent. You can see them in most of the photos below, except the ones where the parent is rushing out to catch some fish or coming home from eating krill (tiny shrimp-like creatures that are key to the entire Antarctic food chain), squid, and fish. 

Dinner time. The tongue is just as bright orange as the beak. I thought that was kind of surprising. Also, the tongue is like a cat's tongue with sharp spikes curving back towards the throat.  They're called papillae, and they help with catching prey.   

A chick pushing its head into the throat of its parent to get food may be a bit disturbing, but it's nothing compared with the videos they showed during the recap presentation that night. Someone had videos of  the semi-digested fish paste oozing out of the parent's throat and into the chick's mouth. Ick! In this photo, you can see the papillae (that's a fun word) on the parent's tongue in even more detail. 

Most of the time, the chicks seemed to be enjoying the warmth and security of a parent's belly. 

More chicks burrowing under bellies. All four of these parents have a chick under there. Fun how they're all facing the same way. 

It's not just a penguin photo, it's an Antarctica penguin photo. The setting is as important to me as the animals.  

Love this amazing glacier face combined with the penguins.

That afternoon, we moved on to a different landing site. In the photo, you can see a guide standing in a Zodiac, just below a rare bit of direct sunlight hitting the glacier face. The glacier is even larger than it looks, as he's not as close to the face as it looks like in this photo. Safety demands keeping a safe distance away from glaciers, as they could calve without warning; creating a huge wave that could capsize or swamp nearby boats. 

The glacier is breaking up into chunks because it's sliding over a large hump of rock underneath. 

This is a Weddell seal that we saw when we arrived at the next site. You can tell the difference between this and a leopard seal by the shape of the face and jaw.  The lower jaw of a leopard seal is bizarrely large and deep. The Weddell seal has the cuter whisker face. 

Funny how they look so comfortable lying on a lumpy bed of ice. They have no fear of the nearby people and boats. 

After getting a good look at this seal, and watching a Minke whale play with another Zodiac, we landed and hung out with the local penguins. 

They would often decide to squawk for a few seconds. 

I saw them point their beak to the sky quite a few times also. Maybe they're just stretching their necks. I like the water and glacier in the background. 

Coming home from fishing. 

Here's a quick video of a couple of penguins on one of the many penguin highways at the colony. Once a few penguins take the same path, the snow and ice are compacted, which makes it easier to walk there. After that, more and more take the same path until it turns into a highway they all like to take. These guys were so cute. You can hear me reminding someone to give them room (as the guides had told us to) because everyone gets so excited to see a penguin coming so close that they often end up standing right in the path of the poor confused penguin. 

Also audible in the background - the otherworldly sound of all the penguins doing their various cries, . 

We saw this whale on the way out of the bay. You can see the roiled water where another whale dove a second before. 

Links to other Antarctica posts:

First Antarctica post, including video of the epic 80 MPH storm we lived through.

Second Antarctica post, with spectacular icebergs in the sun. 

Third Antarctica post, about passing through the narrow channel called the Gullet.

Lots more penguin photos.

Antarctica: Gentoo Penguin Colony

Our penguin colony excursion was amazing, if eye-watering. We could smell it from the Zodiac long before we landed. Once we arrived on shore, you simply had to try to block it out of your mind, which wasn't always easy. Happily, the sounds and activities all around made for compelling distractions. Parent and chick below. I wouldn't say "mother and chick" because the mother and father share responsibilities for the chick. They alternate minding the chick and going for food. 

This is how the colony looked as we approached. The hard blue ice of the glacier, exposed by wind, fractures, and melting, can be seen in the back. The middle ground is snow with red and yellow algae growing in it, while the penguins are perched mainly on the black bedrock in the foreground. 

Three families of penguins, with the left parent feeding the juvenile by regurgitation. 

I think he got tired and decided to rest.  

Jennifer got this great shot with her phone. 

  

Whenever they walk on land, they look like they can barely keep their balance, but I saw them do some pretty tough maneuvers jumping from rock to rock. Didn't see any fall over. 

The uneven feathers are a sign of molting, when they get new feathers. Penguin molting is called "catastrophic molting" because it happens all over the whole body at once, which is unusual.   

Two parent-child pairs in this one. I like how the one on the right has a rock to add to his or her nest. Also, I love that mountain in the back. No rock is visible. It completely lost the battle with snow and ice. 

Most of the chicks were nearly full size, as we were there in late Antarctic summer, meaning the chicks hatched months ago.  

It was gray and cold, with a tiny bit of rain, during our visit to this Gentoo penguin colony. Gentoos have a red beak and a white mark on the head behind the eyes. Watching all these penguins in the cold rain made me question my concept of comfort. This was some of the best weather they see all year: a bit of sunlight and relatively warm temperatures. In fact, since their blubber keeps them perfectly comfortable in near-freezing water, they may think of 35 degrees Fahrenheit as too damned hot. 

Penguin Rock Band - with the vocalist up front, the awkward adolescent molting, the lazy guy lying down, and the thoughtful one staring at the sea in back. 

Sometimes they seemed to get a burst of energy and just start flapping their wings and wagging their tail wildly. This one's tail is wagging so fast it's just a blur. 

At first I didn't like the red, green, and yellow algae spoiling the perfect blue of the ice, but then I started to like the variety of color it provides. Some might accuse me of thinking in terms of what it looks like in photos before anything else. 

The glacier face may appear close in this photo, but is about a mile away. 

I feared this guy would slip or trip, but he knew what he was doing. He even hopped up onto a higher rock and one point. Not bad. 

Can't resist that insane deep glacier ice. We're seeing a cross section of the compacted hard ice that's usually buried under snow. 

Here's a short video from Jennifer of penguins on a "penguin highway."  It's sort of like deer trails. It's easier to walk on packed snow, so after a few go the same way, the rest continue using the same path, until it gets packed into a groove that becomes a trail used by the whole colony. 

A couple of short videos of penguins porpoising. I'm no videographer yet. Anyway, it's tough to figure out where they're going to surface next! 

That's all the penguins for this post, but a couple more fun things from that day. These are from later the same evening. We saw whales on a regular basis. I wonder what these waters would have looked like back in the late 1800's, when there were still millions of whales.  

A couple of short videos of whales diving.

Something we chose NOT to do - the Polar Plunge - see the guy in midair? We were amazed at how many people chose to do it. They had a tether on, plus two guides in a Zodiac ready for rescue. In the closer Zodiac, a ship photographer in an orange life vest was taking photos. 

In this photo, guides were out practicing cold water rescues when a whale passed by. There were several whales working this bay that night. This provides a hint of the relative sizes of the whale, the people, and the glacier behind. If you're looking at this on a phone, you'll probably need to zoom in. 

That's it for the first penguin post! 

Click here for even more penguin photos, plus videos in the next post. 

Click here for my first Antarctica post, including video of the epic 80 MPH storm we lived through.

Click here for my second Antarctica post, with spectacular icebergs in the sun. 

Click here for my third Antarctica post, about passing through the narrow channel called the Gullet.

Arriving South of the Antarctic Circle

I've wanted to visit Antarctica ever since watching TV documentaries about it when I was a child. Traveling there as a tourist used to be impossible. Then, a few scientific ships built to resist collisions with iceberg fragments were converted for touring. I wanted to go in those days, but it never happened. I wanted to feel like an explorer going into uncharted territory, but it's too late for that now. We are living at the dawn of mass tourism to Antarctica. Several companies have recently built luxurious ships capable of handling the ice and weather there. We put down our deposit in the month of February 2020. A couple of COVID-infested years later, we were finally able to take the trip we'd planned for so long.

The World Explorer, operated by Quark Expeditions, can accommodate about 170 passengers and has about 45 crew members, including captain, operations staff, expedition guides, dining room and "hotel" workers, and more. This is an expedition ship, as opposed to a cruise ship, which means it carries a small enough number of passengers to allow for landings.   

Antarctica is a continent larger than the continental United States that is not owned by any country or individual. The Antarctic Treaty, first agreed in December 1959, was the culmination about fifteen years of arguments among great power nations after WWII. The treaty is an agreement among a large group of nations, including Chile and Argentina, which are the closest countries to Antarctica, that no country should claim any part of the continent as territory. 

Since we had heard the weather is often so bad that it's unsafe to try to get off the ship, we decided on a longer trip that crossed the Antarctic Circle (the latitude below which there are sometimes 24-hour days and nights). This would give us more days where we might have a chance to hop on the Zodiacs. 

From the town of Ushuaia, at the southern tip of South America, ships take two full days to cross the Drake Passage. This area is the only latitude on earth where wind and sea can circle the entire planet with no interruption by land. This results in frequent high seas. We had moderate seas during the crossing, with the ship rolling enough to make walking a little challenging, but nothing violent.  

Despite the reasonableness of the Drake Passage crossing, the captain informed us that a powerful storm was chasing us. On the third day we arrived south of the Antarctic Circle. It was a relief to see land for the first time in three days. During the day, the wind was between forty and sixty miles per hour. We had some good views from the awesome wraparound interior/exterior observation deck of the ship. 

During dinner, the wind continued to increase. The ship was rocking so much that you had to put your hands out to the sides to grab the walls or rails in case you stumbled. At dinner, we heard a few dishes slide off tables and smash on the floor. After dinner, the sustained winds were over eighty miles per hour, and the ship would lean far to one side and then slowly roll the other way. Our ship was further south than any other ship by quite a distance, so our group was truly alone. No rescue nearby if something went wrong. I started to wonder if a storm like this was normal. Here's a video taken from inside our room, looking out from our balcony. 

Click here to see high quality video: Antarctica Storm video

The storm turned out severe enough to force the captain to stay at the helm all night. The ship's instruments recorded gusts of 130 MPH. We found out this was the worst storm he, or any of our expedition guides, had ever experienced. So, it really was as bad as I'd started to wonder the night before! Glad we didn't freeze in Antarctic waters!  

The next day, the winds were still a sustained thirty-plus MPH, so we couldn't get off the ship. Instead, we headed north, vainly hoping for better weather. But, at least we could see the continent.  As we made our way north, we started to see our first full-fledged icebergs. Notice the spray from the huge wave breaking on the iceberg.  

If photos are too large to fit on your monitor, you can click any one for a popup gallery, and scroll with left and right arrow keys. 

This one has a really rough texture - it may not be very old. It hasn't had time to melt or smooth out. You can see where the original top was - on the left end, where it just appears as smooth white snow. 

This one really looks like a swirly ice cream cone, especially the top.  These shelves form as the iceberg rests in the sea and melts and turns, and the water action melts one area until it turns again. This thing is probably a hundred feet high. It was towering over us. And of course, it may be as much as nine hundred feet below the surface. Many like this are too large to float, so they rest on the bottom until they can shrink.  

This is the edge of a glacier, and the bluer, caved in area is where one or a few massive icebergs calved off into the sea. 

The only place we saw black rock was where the mountains were too steep for snow to stick.  I loved how this glacier is fracturing into hundreds of seracs standing in rows, and they're all so blue and clean. 

So many textures on the surface of this huge iceberg, caused by a combination of fracturing, sea water, sun, wind, and melting.  

A closer view of this intricate one. 

Detail of a different iceberg  

I looked out my balcony window and saw this group of seals lounging on an iceberg. One of the two on the left turned his head to look at our ship, but the rest didn't even bother. There is a trail of blood coming from the one at the far right. I wish I knew the story behind that. 

So many icebergs are like sculptures - as if there is some kind of intention behind their shapes.  I like the colors of dark sky, snow-covered mountain, and greenish water in combination with the striations of blue within the glacier ice itself.  

Click here to see my second Antarctica post, with even more photos of spectacular icebergs, glaciers, and at least one whale. 

Click here for the third set of Antarctica photos, with more stunning icebergs and glaciers.

Click here for the the fourth set - penguins, penguins, penguins!

More Gentoo penguins, at two different sites.