Early Arrival

I spot land from the window in my room??!! Yup. A full day sooner than any expedition that’s happened in the 4 years this ship has been sailing. And icebergs too!!!

And see those dots on top of the hill?

Zoom in and you’ll notice they’re . . . Penguins!

But it doesn’t stop there. Nope. We had the opportunity to get up close and personal-ish with our first landing!!!!

The penguins were the designated five (or more) meters away, but closer if they ventured into the orange-coned off areas the Expedition Team set for us.

Parents and chicks. UNBELIEVABLE!

And doing general penguin behaviours.

They are very noisy and very funny.

Penguin Factoids

• The ones with what looks like a chin around their neck are called Chinstrap Penguins (those scientists can be literal in their naming conventions) while the other ones in these images are Gentoo penguins. They’re both, along with the Adelie penguins, members of the Brush-tailed penguins (i.e. their tails look like a brush) found in Antarctica.
• These babies were likely born about a month ago.
• Penguins are serious about co-parenting with dad sitting on the egg during the several weeks of incubation while mom fills up in the sea, and then both parents sharing the responsibility of being with and feeding the baby chick until the parents start molting/have had enough.
• The red stuff is guano (i.e. penguin poo), red because their diet is based on the all-important krill.
• Brush-tailed penguins have interesting sleep habits: they have micronaps of 3-5 seconds at a time that add up to about 11 hours a day. Their sleep can also be unihemispheric: one half of the brain is asleep while other half is awake (I’ve begun claiming on not-great-sleep nights that I slept like a penguin).
• Penguin nests are made out of stones and it’s quite hilarious watching the males do the great stone shuffle to impress their mate because surely some stones are better than others ?! Some researcher colour-coded stones per nest to learn more about this behaviour and within a few days apparently the entire rookery was a rainbow. So there’s much absconding from each other.

Here’s the sweetest picture ever that a fellow expeditioner captured.

Final penguin fact that was news to me: as hilarious/adorable their on-land waddle is, penguins are incredibly graceful in the water as they swim and come up for air (it’s called porpoising).

When I figure out how to upload videos to my YouTube channel I’ll send them along to share their giggle-inducing waddling and general racket-making.