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 One, Beagle Channel and Magellanic Penguins

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: On the afternoon of January 7, after a day of birding around Ushuaia, we boarded the Clipper Adventurer. By about 7 p.m. we were under way, cruising east down the Beagle Channel. That might sound like a specialized offering on cable, but it’s actually a narrow strait of water running through the southern part of Tierra del Fuego. It was named for The Beagle, the ship on which Darwin traveled. Captain FitzRoy of The Beagle was responsible for exploring this waterway at the southern tip of South America during two voyages in the 1820s and 1830s.


During the evening we were mostly admiring the scenery -- just as Darwin did when he arrived here in 1833 -- but of course we were also birding, and people who stayed on deck late enough saw the first penguins of the trip, the first of the eight species that we would encounter. These were distant views of swimming birds, and observers were startled to hear that these mysterious distant "ducks" or "grebes" were really Magellanic Penguins. The photos below were all taken a couple of days later in the Falkland Islands.


The first thing to notice in this close-up portrait is the color of the background: green. The public may think of penguins as birds of the deep-freeze zones, but Magellanic Penguin belongs to the genus Spheniscus, a group of four penguins that are all limited to mild climates. These are Galapagos Penguin on the Equator, Humboldt Penguin in western South America, Jackass Penguin (yeah, that’s one of its official names) in southern Africa, and the Magellanic, which is found all around the southern coasts of South America. The latter has several large colonies in Argentina, and seeing it in the Beagle Channel was no surprise.
The second thing to notice is that the bird has, let’s face it, sort of a slow-witted expression. Penguins aren’t at their best on land anyway, but Magellanics come across as rather dim bulbs.

As we would see on the Falklands a couple of days later, it’s a common thing to see Magellanic Penguins standing around peering at holes in the ground. But they have a good excuse: that’s where they nest. They’ll dig burrows up to six feet deep, laying their eggs in a cavity at the end of the burrow, and tending their young underground until the chicks are large enough to be safe from most predators. Penguins in the Antarctic nest out in the open, but several kinds in the temperate zone are burrow nesters.

Here’s an adult Magellanic Penguin peering out of its burrow. The striking face pattern is a lot less obvious once the bird is in the shadows, and it may serve as disruptive coloration, breaking up the bird’s outline and making it less conspicuous.

Zooming in and overexposing another shot of a penguin in its burrow, we can see a couple of chicks lurking in the background.

And here’s a better look at a slightly larger chick out at the entrance to the nest burrow with one parent bird. The chicks are fed by both parents for at least two months before they molt out of their fluffy down and go out to sea.

This might seem like an odd juxtaposition, but I have to stop writing about baby penguins now because our rock band is performing in a couple of hours. The band has had only three practices in the eight days that Kim and I have been home, and there's a certain adrenaline rush involved in trying get mentally prepared and get back into rock-'n-roll mode. But I'll try to blog more about the Antarctic trip tomorrow.