Coronation Island
I had only to glimpse Dr. Tom Smith’s face this morning to know that we had experienced both personalities of the southern oceans. Every whisker on the wizened facade of this living polar legend was so encrusted with icicles that we could scarcely see his grin. Apparently the howling winds, near-blizzard snow and bounding waves that assaulted our Zodiac were nothing to him, but the rest of us were frozen.
Nevertheless, most of us were grinning just as widely as Tom. While he had been shuttling passengers back and forth from the ship, we had been ashore on seldom-visited Coronation Island in the remote South Orkneys. This lonely island chain was first discovered in 1820 by American sealer Nathaniel Palmer, who was sailing in consort with British Captain George Powell. Together, they quickly wiped out the fur seals, and since then no one but a few scientists have had much reason to return. And when they try, a combination of pack ice, winds and bad weather usually makes it difficult to get ashore.
As a consequence, the wildlife has since remained relatively undisturbed. We landed on a stony beach where the expedition naturalists guessed that within easy strolling distance at least eight to ten thousand nesting pairs of chinstrap penguins were mating, laying eggs and beginning to nest in rare places where the snow has blown away. As our eyes stretched in either direction, however, we realized that this small cluster was just a small part of a colony stretching miles along the shore—perhaps as many as 150,000 pairs, one of the largest in the world.
As part of this vital life cycle, the noise is cacophonous, with mating calls, territorial squabbling and squawks that help one mate find another in a maze where each nest is just pecking distance apart from its neighbors on every side. Meanwhile predators were eternally circling. Huge skuas dive-bombed like F-16’s hoping for a bare egg or a weak chick. Sometimes they even worked together, with one bird distracting the mother, then the other seizing her egg. A giant petrel hopped awkwardly along the shore, hoping for similar prey, and even more frightening was a small group of leopard seals, circling like sharks with their huge-hinged jaws filled with cruel teeth—the last thing ever seen by many an unlucky “chinny.”
As memorable for anyone, I suspect, was the hardiness of all these creatures, stoically proceeding with their daily lives in conditions most people in our group would call “miserable,” at best. But these animals have seen, and will see both much better and much, much worse—all part of the magic of Antarctica.
I had only to glimpse Dr. Tom Smith’s face this morning to know that we had experienced both personalities of the southern oceans. Every whisker on the wizened facade of this living polar legend was so encrusted with icicles that we could scarcely see his grin. Apparently the howling winds, near-blizzard snow and bounding waves that assaulted our Zodiac were nothing to him, but the rest of us were frozen.
Nevertheless, most of us were grinning just as widely as Tom. While he had been shuttling passengers back and forth from the ship, we had been ashore on seldom-visited Coronation Island in the remote South Orkneys. This lonely island chain was first discovered in 1820 by American sealer Nathaniel Palmer, who was sailing in consort with British Captain George Powell. Together, they quickly wiped out the fur seals, and since then no one but a few scientists have had much reason to return. And when they try, a combination of pack ice, winds and bad weather usually makes it difficult to get ashore.
As a consequence, the wildlife has since remained relatively undisturbed. We landed on a stony beach where the expedition naturalists guessed that within easy strolling distance at least eight to ten thousand nesting pairs of chinstrap penguins were mating, laying eggs and beginning to nest in rare places where the snow has blown away. As our eyes stretched in either direction, however, we realized that this small cluster was just a small part of a colony stretching miles along the shore—perhaps as many as 150,000 pairs, one of the largest in the world.
As part of this vital life cycle, the noise is cacophonous, with mating calls, territorial squabbling and squawks that help one mate find another in a maze where each nest is just pecking distance apart from its neighbors on every side. Meanwhile predators were eternally circling. Huge skuas dive-bombed like F-16’s hoping for a bare egg or a weak chick. Sometimes they even worked together, with one bird distracting the mother, then the other seizing her egg. A giant petrel hopped awkwardly along the shore, hoping for similar prey, and even more frightening was a small group of leopard seals, circling like sharks with their huge-hinged jaws filled with cruel teeth—the last thing ever seen by many an unlucky “chinny.”
As memorable for anyone, I suspect, was the hardiness of all these creatures, stoically proceeding with their daily lives in conditions most people in our group would call “miserable,” at best. But these animals have seen, and will see both much better and much, much worse—all part of the magic of Antarctica.
