Antarctica, Day Three: Carcass Characters

From home base in Ohio, Kenn and Kim write: Our first landing of the trip was on the morning of January 9, on Saunders Island in the Falklands (see previous post on "Punks and Saints" posted on Feb. 18). That afternoon we made a second landing, on nearby Carcass Island, also situated in the northwestern part of the Falklands archipelago. Carcass Island isn’t as grim a spot as its name might imply; it was named for a British ship, the HMS Carcass, that visited the region in the 1770s.

Today the island is mostly occupied by sheep farming, but it still has a lot of birdlife. Undoubtedly there’s the occasional real carcass around (sheep fall victim to a variety of mishaps, after all, and various sea creatures wash up dead on the beaches), so there’s an open niche for scavengers. A common scavenger here was the Striated Caracara. This bird also occurs in southern South America, but it’s easier to find on the Falklands than anywhere else.

The adult Striated Caracara always seems to have a disheveled look -- at least, in several trips to the Falklands, Kenn has yet to see one that looked clean and crisp. They’re always messy. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard.

The orange on the skin around the face indicates the adult. In a closeup view, it’s also easy to see the whitish streaks, or striations, responsible for the bird’s name. Incidentally, closeup views are easy to obtain; Striated Caracaras are ridiculously tame. The local name for the bird here on the Falklands is "Johnny Rook," and it’s not always used as an affectionate term. At one time there was a bounty on Johnny Rooks because they were considered pests around sheep farms, and their numbers were seriously depleted. Now the species has recovered somewhat.

Young Striated Caracaras (a.k.a. Johnny Rooklets) have duller skin on the face, browner plumage, and fewer white striations.

On Carcass Island we found what appeared to be a nest, with three large young Striated Caracaras, apparently just about full-grown. They were squabbling over some unmentionable scrap of carrion that one of the parents had brought, and they looked and acted just about as gross as the adults. Not all birds can be beautiful, you know, but they all can be interesting.

Much of Carcass Island (and the Falklands in general) was originally covered by thick clumps of tussock grass. On Carcass, the owners have fenced off some areas of this grass to keep out the sheep, and these grassy places are the domain of the Blackish Cinclodes, locally known as the Tussac Bird. Actually, like many island birds, this cinclodes is very adaptable, scavenging on the shorelines, around seabird colonies and seals on the beach. Sometimes it seems determined to come up and eat your shoelaces. No long lenses needed to photograph this bird.

South America has many species of cinclodes, all associated with open country, often on rocky open areas above treeline in the mountains or along shorelines. These birds belong to the ovenbird family (about which we wrote back in early January, in Buenos Aires), a large family restricted to the American tropics; no species has ever been found north of the Mexican border, so it’s hard to describe the group by reference to North American birds. The Blackish Cinclodes is one of the dullest cinclodes but it makes up for drabness with its cheeky personality.

A specialty that we sought here was the Cobb’s Wren. The first time that Kenn was in the Falklands, this was still considered just the local form of House Wren, and it may go back to that status any day now. Certainly it looks like a washed-out version of the familiar House Wren, although its bill is longer. We looked for Cobb’s Wren in the tussock grass and eventually found it out on the shoreline rocks, bouncing around on the kelp next to the tidepools. It makes sense for these island birds to take advantage of the rich food resources in these areas; a couple of years ago, we watched Yellow Warblers doing the same thing in the Galapagos.

Lest you think that Carcass Island’s birds were all drab brown things, of interest only to hardcore bird maniacs, we should mention that we also found more Magellanic Penguins nesting here. This cozy scene, with an adult and two young resting in the entrance of their nesting burrow, was not far from our landing site.

And here, because we can’t resist, is a closeup of one of the baby penguins!

Antarctica, Day Three: Punks and Saints

From Home Base, Kenn and Kim write: We should state up front that the Falkland Islands (or, as the Argentinians would call them, Las Islas Malvinas) are best classified as part of the subantarctic region, not part of Antarctica itself. The islands lie east of the southern tip of South America, and we actually had to travel somewhat north from Ushuaia, Argentina, to get there. After being out at sea all day on January 8, we had the Falklands in sight by very early in the morning on January 9, and we made our first landing of the trip at Saunders Island, in the northwest part of the archipelago, early this morning.

Ferried ashore in the Zodiacs, the sturdy inflatable boats that are a mainstay of adventure cruising worldwide, we got an eyeful and earful of wildlife on Saunders Island. This fabulous first stop presented a series of spectacles that kept us gasping with delight for the entire morning. Magellanic Penguins (about which we wrote in our post of Feb. 6) were in the water and on the beach, to be upstaged by hundreds of Gentoo Penguins and dozens of King Penguins. We’ll write more about those soon. But the star penguins of the day were the bold, weird little Rockhopper Penguins. We knew that Saunders would be our main encounter with this species, so we all spent a lot of time watching them.

Rockhoppers DO hop on rocks. Their nesting colony on Saunders was high on a hillside, and the birds had to hop and waddle and scramble up a very steep rocky slope to bring food to their young. Fortunately, they seem to be pretty tough birds, able to make this arduous journey over and over during the nesting season. But the effort could explain their grouchy expressions.

Of course we shouldn’t assign human expressions to animals, but with the Rockhoppers it was almost impossible to resist the temptation. For example, we couldn't help wondering what this adult might be telling its fuzzy half-grown chick.

Everyone on these Antarctic cruises is instructed not to approach the wildlife - - to stay back at least 15 feet from the birds (or farther for some species). But if you stand still, some of the birds will walk up to you. The Rockhoppers seemed curious, in a grouchy way, waddling up to members of our group and staring at them as if to say, "what the hell ... ?"

Kim pointed out that, with their spiky hairdos and weird expressions, the penguins were misnamed; they really should have been called Punk-Rock Hoppers.

("Hey, human chick, you wanna step outside and repeat that?")

Of course, once we were into this mode of anthropomorphizing (that is, applying human characteristics to animals), it was hard to get out of it. Nesting on the same hillsides as the Rockhoppers were colonies of Black-browed Albatrosses. We had seen many of these at sea the day before (along with lesser numbers of the much larger Wandering Albatrosses). But here we were able to watch them up close, tending their young, and we were struck by how they seemed gentle, benign, even wise.

The Falkland Islands are a major nesting area for Black-browed Albatrosses. According to some estimates, 80 percent of the total world population nests here.

Their nests are built up of dried mud, and shaped like little volcanoes. In many of the nests we could see the single young, still covered with fuzzy grayish-white down. Almost every active nest was tended by one of the parents; presumably the other parent was away foraging at sea. We saw a few exchanges where one adult would come back with food for the young, and after various greeting rituals, the adult that had been there would leave.

Admittedly, the young were cute enough that they seemed worth guarding with care!

Maybe we can’t really tell what the adult albatrosses are thinking, but they do have beautiful faces. Can you deny the sense that these look like gentle giants?

Antarctica, Day Two: I.D. At Sea

From home base, Kenn writes: (now that I've been so cutely interrupted by Kim's last post ... That's the thing about Kimmer, I can't stay mad at her for more than a few seconds at a time.) On January 8, when I got out on deck around 5 a.m., we had left the Beagle Channel itself but the islands of Tierra del Fuego were still visible off the stern. Dozens of Sooty Shearwaters and Greater Shearwaters, plus various other seabirds, were around the ship. The last of the land soon disappeared behind us but we would continue to see large numbers of seabirds all day. Most seabirds are beautiful creatures and amazing masters of flight, and in addition, many of them present fascinating challenges in identification.

Check this out. I know you can’t see much detail, but this is an unaltered photo taken from the rail of the upper back deck of the ship, with six seabirds captured in the same frame. From left, they’re a young Wandering Albatross, a Brown Skua, three Greater Shearwaters, and a Northern Giant-Petrel. I’m not saying every moment was like this, but it was common to have 30 or 40 individual birds visible at once.

Watching birds here was good practice for identifying them back in North America. This Wilson’s Storm-Petrel nests only on islands in the far southern oceans, but it’s common in the northern summer off the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. and Canada, and scarce off the coast of California.

Greater Shearwater is another bird we can see close to home in the northern summer. At that season it’s common off the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. and Canada, but it nests only on islands in the South Atlantic.

Identifying seabirds can be tough, partly because the viewing conditions at sea can be challenging, partly because the differences can be subtle. Even on very large seabirds, the best field marks can involve small differences. Take a look at this Southern Giant-Petrel ...

... and then at this Northern Giant-Petrel. Both species are variable in plumage, and the best way to tell them apart is by the color of the tip of the bill: green on the Southern, red on the Northern. Those who are red/green color-blind, as some excellent birders are, might note that the Northern's bill tip looks darker than that of the Southern. (These are poor names, incidentally, since both species live only in the Southern Hemisphere and their ranges overlap extensively.)

Variation reaches an extreme in the beautiful Wandering Albatross. It has five distinct populations, nesting on different island groups, that are thought by some to be separate species. All of them vary at least a little with age, so there are a vast number of different plumages possible on these birds. Add to that the fact that Royal Albatross can be very similar to Wandering, it has two distinct populations that also might be separate species, and it also varies with age. The richly colored brown bird above is one of the youngest Wandering Albatrosses.

This bird, extensively white above, is an older Wandering Albatross and may be an adult male, although some old males can become even whiter than this (and some adult females might duplicate the appearance of the bird in the photo).

This partially brown bird is in the Wandering Albatross complex and is almost certainly a young bird, although there are a few populations in which even the adults show a lot of brown. We saw many such variations today, and enjoyed discussing the identification of all of them.

Fortunately, we often got to look at Wandering Albatross individuals from very close range!

For this voyage, Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT) had filled 85 of the 110 spaces on the Clipper Adventurer. You can’t have 85 participants and only one or two leaders, so VENT had recruited a team of leaders, all of them long-time friends of mine, starting with Victor Emanuel himself. Victor has been a friend of mine since the mid-1970s, when I was a teenager and he hadn’t yet started his tour company. Also along as leaders were Barry Lyon, a seasoned world birder and one of the professionals in the VENT office; Louise Zemaitis, great all-around naturalist, teacher, and nature artist; Michael O’Brien, a bird identification expert and lead author of The Shorebird Guide; and Lars Jonsson, from Sweden, probably the most renowned bird painter in the world today, and a leading authority on bird identification as well. Dr. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was supposed to have been a leader on this trip, and at the last minute he was unable to go. In his place, he sent Brian Sullivan, head of Project e-Bird for the lab, and another expert on bird identification, especially seabirds. Finally, the ship’s ornithologist, Geoff Carpentier from Canada, was also on deck, taking part in the discussions of identification from the perspective of his experience in these waters.

So a day at sea, looking at challenging or tricky seabirds, turned into a wonderful ongoing discussion and series of impromptu seminars in birding. For me, with my long-time interest in advanced bird identification, and for Kim, who is interested in all of these things and who was seeing some of these southern seabirds for the first time, this was a day of total fascination. Some people might imagine that all those hours on the open ocean could become boring, but for a birder, nothing could be further from the truth.

Antarctica: Outline of the trip

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: We traveled to the Antarctic on board the Clipper Adventurer from January 7 to 25, 2009, on a birding and wildlife expedition sponsored by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. Before and after the voyage we were in Argentina, starting in the capital city of Buenos Aires and joining the ship in the southern outpost city of Ushuaia. The map below will help to put these points in a world perspective.

Points for reference: 1. Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2. Ushuaia, Argentina. 3. Antarctic Peninsula.

The vast majority of expedition cruises to Antarctica go from South America to the Antarctic Peninsula, and the map shows why. South America extends much farther south than Africa or Australia, and the Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost point of the white continent, so the crossing is feasible for many kinds of ships. There are also some expedition cruises that go south from New Zealand and take in the subantarctic islands of that country, and a few cruises that go south through the bird-rich waters of South Africa to the continent's edge, and we would like to try those routes eventually. But so far, all five of my trips have originated in South America.

Most world maps (like the one above) show Antarctica as an ill-defined mass along the lower edge, so it's hard for most people to get an idea of the continent's size. Antarctica is huge -- near the size of Australia and Europe combined. It is roughly centered on the South Pole, and the interior of the continent is the coldest region on earth. We confess that, as naturalists, we're not very interested in visiting the South Pole; nothing lives there except a few dedicated scientists. Remarkably, the South Polar Skua has occurred there as a stray, having flown many hundreds of miles across lifeless ice and rock, but we'd rather watch birds like this out at the Antarctic coastline where they belong.

The majority of expedition cruises from Ushuia go straight across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula and back. But our trip was focused on birds and wildlife, so we took the longer route northeast to the Falkland Islands, farther east to remote South Georgia Island, then southwest to the Antarctic Peninsula and back north across the Drake Passage. On the voyage we spent eight full days at sea (enjoying fabulous seabirds, whales, and dolphins), and during the other ten days we made landings at no fewer than 18 sites. This was Kim's first trip to the region and I can say without hesitation that it was my best trip ever. In subsequent posts we'll be describing the experiences of the voyage in detail.

Homeward Bound

From Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kenn and Kim write: Our Antarctic trip finished up with our return to Tierra del Fuego, in southernmost Argentina, on January 25. We'll be home in Ohio in another day or so. But having found a good internet connection here in Buenos Aires, we couldn't resist sending our greetings -- and a few teaser photos to share just a tiny bit of our experience.


This is a distant view of a tiny fraction of the King Penguin colony at Salisbury Plain on South Georgia Island. Look closely! Each little black and brown figure in this photo is a penguin! The brown ones are the big, fat woolly youngsters. They looked so much like bowling pins in fur coats! We saw tens of thousands of penguins on this trip, representing eight species, and we'll describe each species in separate posts after we get home.

Encounters with marine mammals provided some of the non-avian highlights of the trip. Whales, dolphins, and seals are all part of the Antarctic birding experience. Just wait until you see the Orca stuff we have to share!

It's going to take us a while to fully assimilate everything that we saw during the last few weeks, but we'll try to organize it all into posts on the blog so we can share what we experienced and we've learned about Antarctica with you.

Whitecaps and White-chins

From the Clipper Adventurer in the middle of the Drake Passage, Kenn and Kim write: Yesterday evening, the Chinstrap Penguins and Gentoo Penguins bid us farewell as we left Barrientos Island in the South Shetlands and headed north for the crossing back to Ushuaia. The Drake Passage -- the stretch of water between the northern tip of Antarctica and the southernmost point of South America -- is renowned for its potentially rough seas. Kenn has observed on past trips that it can produce huge waves, but that it can also be flat calm at times (sometimes even earning the term "Drake Lake"). Today was somewhere between these extremes. For much of the morning we couldn’t stand on any of the open decks without holding on to something, making it hard to scan out among the tossing whitecaps and driving spray. Even by late afternoon the ship was still rolling and unpredictably lurching at times. But throughout the day, the ship was being followed by a variety of birds, including at least a dozen White-chinned Petrels.

We took advantage of the opportunity to watch these petrels. Big and stocky, mostly deep chocolate in color, they circled and soared effortlessly on the whipping winds, sometimes hanging in mid-air high over the stern, sometimes swooping in great arcs around the ship. The White-chinned Petrel is widespread in southern seas, nesting on the Falklands and South Georgia Island as well as on several islands in the southern Indian Ocean and islands south of New Zealand. So it’s easy to see this bird if you travel by ship at southern latitudes. It’s not so easy to see the white chin for which it’s named: the bird has only a small patch of white feathers below the big pale bill. But with today’s views we were able to see the white chin of the White-chin repeatedly.

The White-chinned Petrel really does have a white chin, but in a close-up view, the structure of its bill is a more interesting feature

We'll be out in the Drake Passage all day tomorrow as well, but by Sunday midday we'll be back on land in southernmost Argentina ... and after a couple more days in Argentina, we should be home in Ohio by Thursday the 29th. We'll report on our whole trip, a few details at a time, after we get home. It will take a while to digest this experience, but we'll share as much of it as we can.

Update from Antarctica

From the Clipper Adventurer in the Southern Ocean, approaching the Antarctic Peninsula, Kenn and Kim write: If you're reading this, we've just succeeded in connecting with the Internet again, and we were amazed to see all the comments posted regarding our bird puzzle feature! Thank you, everyone who looked at this puzzle and who commented on it. We appreciate your interest! Kim says we should make this kind of puzzle a monthly feature; does anyone else agree?

Anyway -- It appears that we won't be able to attach any photos to this message, so we'll just have to paint a picture with words for the moment. Today (Monday January 19) we were at sea all day, cruising south from the South Orkney Islands toward the Antarctic Peninsula. We saw no land today, but we saw hundreds of icebergs, some of them huge towering mountains of ice, others great flat tabular bergs more than a quarter of a mile across. Birds were not as abundant today as on some of our previous at-sea days, but we saw flocks of Cape Petrels and Southern Fulmars, scores of Wilson's Storm-Petrels and Black-bellied Storm-Petrels, and various other birds. Beautiful snow-white Snow Petrels were flying around many of the larger icebergs, and late in the day we were visited by a few strikingly patterned, fast-flying Antarctic Petrels. Most remarkable of all was a lone Emperor Penguin swimming in the open water, all alone, miles from any land.

Despite seeing such amazing birds, mammals stole the show today: the ship was able to maneuver slowly and respectfully close to several Humpback Whales and huge Fin Whales, and we watched some distant Orcas (Killer Whales) late in the day. At one point, passing a large area of floating pack ice, we saw several Leopard Seals hauled out on the ice -- these big seals are fast-swimming predators, the terror of all the smaller penguins, and the ones on the ice stared at us as we passed, their large reptilian heads frozen in permanent evil grins. We expect to see more Leopard Seals tomorrow, patrolling the waters just off the big Adelie Penguin colony on Paulet Island.

Internet access out here at sea is sporadic at best, but we'll write again when we can. Eventually (after we're back in Ohio, maybe) we'll post a lot of photos from the trip, and more descriptions of the birding highlights.

In With The New Year

From the Time Machine, Kenn writes: If this attempt at pre-publishing actually works, this will post at 6:55 in the morning (eastern standard time) on January 1, 2009. And if all goes according to plan, at that point Kim and I will be all bleary-eyed and hot. Not as a result of partying all night, but as a result of being on a plane all night, on a nine-hour flight from Dallas to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires is at the edge of the tropics, and January 1 is the height of summer there, which is where the "hot" part comes from. Or at least, most of it.

We’ll be out of the country for about four weeks, with several days in northern Argentina, a couple in Tierra del Fuego, and then a long voyage by ship to the Falklands, South Georgia Island, and the Antarctic Peninsula. If possible -- if we can connect to the internet for less than a million dollars -- we’ll attempt to post some bird pix from Argentina, or maybe even from the ship, if the satellite hookup works. But it’s possible that we won’t be able to post anything to the blog for four weeks.

Since we don’t want to lose any of our loyal readers, we’re attempting this thing where we’ve pre-scheduled a number of posts to appear while we’re gone. They won’t be quite every day (but some days might have two). I probably won’t do anything blatant like posting lots of pictures of Kim birding in a bikini (although you never know ... ). We might do things like posting photos of sexy birds, quiz questions with fabulous prizes, or our secret directions to a Carolina Parakeet nesting site. You never know.

It’s possible that I’ve screwed up the technique and that all of our carefully scheduled posts will come spewing out at once, crashing the system. If so -- well, live and learn. But please check back often to see if that has happened. And we’ll be "live" again by the end of January, if not before.

Our very best wishes to all of our birding friends, including those whom we haven't met yet, for a rewarding and hopeful and prosperous new year.

Galapagos memories

From somewhere out in cyberspace, Kenn writes: Just looking at the calendar (and at the falling thermometer) and realizing that a year ago today, we were on the Equator, in the Galapagos Islands. I was one of the leaders on a tour organized by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours. Although I'd been there before, this was Kim's first visit to those famous and enchanted islands.


The bird on the Galapagos that everyone has heard about is the Blue-footed Booby. And, admittedly, it's hard to ignore. Sailors in centuries past called these birds "boobies" because they seemed too dumb to be afraid of humans. Actually, they (like the other birds on the Galapagos) evolved in a setting where there weren't any large predators on land, so they have no natural instinct to fear us. What they do have is really impressive blue feet.


Birders who come here are interested to see the Blue-footed Boobies, of course, but we also want to see everything else, and there are a lot of other specialties of this archipelago. The Swallow-tailed Gulls are spectacular in their own way -- long-winged, long-tailed gulls, sharply patterned in black, white, and gray. The weird thing about them is that they're active mainly at night. Gulls elsewhere in the world may be active at night sometimes (like, foraging in the garbage dump at night if there are lots of lights on) but the Swallow-tailed Gull is mostly nocturnal by choice. Several times when our boat was going from one island to another at night, we would see these gulls flying around over the open ocean, passing through the ship's lights and disappearing into the darkness.



The mockers on the Galapagos may not look so interesting but they're very significant from the standpoint of history. People talk about Charles Darwin coming to the Galapagos and being impressed by the diversity of the finches there -- the group is even referred to as "Darwin's Finches" -- but in fact, Darwin didn't think much of these scuzzy little birds. They all looked about the same to him, so he tossed all his specimens in a box and didn't even bother to label which islands they'd come from. But Darwin did notice that the mockingbirds looked different on the different islands, and that set him to thinking about this idea of evolution.


That picture above is of the form of Galapagos Mockingbird that lives on Santa Cruz Island. We took the picture with a regular lens, not even a telephoto. The birds and other wildlife here are absurdly tame. Sometimes we had to back up away from some bird to get a sharp focus or even to get the whole bird in the frame! The candid photo below shows Kim hard at work photographing Galapagos Sea Lions on the beach on Espanola Island ... a lot of our wildlife photography here required a similar level of effort.