Our first landing on Antarctica

Landing on Antarctica a­­nd Half Moon Island,

January 8, 2018, sunrise 02:22 AM. Sunset 21:47 PM

The Drake Passage only lived up its reputation in being a long crossing, but smooth as can be.  Seasick pills only served to make me sleepy and I had a day and a half of sleep!  There are many rules to keep Antarctica uncontaminated from the outside world and untrammeled by the masses.  Ships with more than 500 passengers are not allowed to land in Antarctica and only one ship at a time can be in any given place.  Only 100 people at a time can be on any landing site, and our time limit per landing was 90 minutes.  There are 5 landing parties named albatross, penguin, petrel, seal and whale that are divided into further groups of three.  We a “penguins” and our subgroup is Gentoo penguins.  We were issued a Hurtigruten windbreaker and boots that came almost to our knees. There are no docks at our landing sites so all our landings are considered “wet landings” and we go off the side of the zodiac into the water to get ashore.   Today at Half Moon Island it was 47 degrees with some clouds, some sun, and some wind.  I’m sure it’s nicer here than in Seattle.  The island is located at 62 degrees South and at no point during our trip do we actually go beyond the Antarctic Circle.  Antarctica is a huge island—at least  1 ½ times the size of the US.  My first view of Antarctica was walking around the deck of the boat this morning and there is white, white, and white as far as the eye can see.  

The snow has melted off much of the Half Moon Island and left warmer nesting areas for the 2000 mating pairs of Chinstrap penguins that nest here yearly.  Chinstraps are quite distinctive and one of the 5 penguin species in Antarctica.  The all have a black band below their beaks that early explorer thought looked like the chin straps of soldier helmets.  They are slimmer, bigger and have bigger rookeries than other penguins according to one of our lecturers on the boat, but they seem about the same size as other penguins we have seen.  At the end of October, the males come ashore to the same rookery where they were born and the males are responsible for making nests of the small stone that lie everywhere on the island.  The nest is elevated and thus drier than making a nest of the ground or on snow.  The penguins, whether as a game or what, steal stones from each other’s nests.  A researcher a few years ago put 100 colored stones in just one area and the closest penguins used them to make their nest.  Over a couple week period, the stones were almost everywhere in the colony due to this pilfering of stones from each other’s nests.  When the nest is complete, the female Chinstrap lays 2 eggs in the nest.  Both male and female care for the eggs and the babies equally.  It is impossible to tell the difference between male and female penguins. These penguins, like most penguin species are monogamous and come back to the same mate after an 8 month absence during which they are in the sea.  The male as well as female has a pouch where the eggs are incubated for 32 days and the baby penguins stay for a couple week after birth. Penguins’ dense feathers make them waterproof and no heat can escape from their bodies so this is the only way to keep the eggs and the chicks warm. The babies are now hatching and we saw many babies, some sitting on their mother’s or father’s feet, some with part of their body inside the pouch and some with their heads inside and their bodies outside.   .    Any threat to the babies is quickly met with action by the penguins as birds called scubas would receive quite a hostile reception as they tried to get into the nests or too close to the babies.  The penguins would extend their neck skyward, open their mouths and let out a squawk and go after the skuas.  The rookery on Half Moon Island has 2000 nesting pairs and the penguins find their mates and their chicks by sound so it’s q pretty noisy place!  The babies, like most species of babies, are just adorable—little bundles of grey fuzz that will stay that way for 2 weeks until their feathers come in and they will look like the rest of the Chinstrap penguin colony.  The parenting responsibilities are finished at 2- 2 ½ months when parental feeding stops and the penguins go to seas for the next 8  months until the cycle starts again next October.