We landed this morning on Saunders Island in the northwest Falklands. Our Plan A landing site was scratched due to high winds, but the ship found a safer place around the bend for Plan B where we could wade ashore to a wide beach.
To the left was a walk to a Gentoo penguin colony. To the right a kelp-eating steer acting as a signpost to start a longer walk to an albatross breeding colony and rockhopper penguins. We headed right.
Brown-browed albatrosses (also known as the black-browed mollymawk) are the most common member of its family. They get their name from their dark eyebrow, which extend like dark eyeliner. Their wingspan of 7 to 8 feet is impressive but considerably less than their larger cousin the wandering albatross, which clocks in at 11 feet. Albatrosses, like penguins, sooty terns, shearwaters, and petrels are pelagic birds spending the greater portion of their lives on the open ocean. They only come to land to breed.
Of 600,000 nesting pairs, 400,000 breed in the Falkland Islands. The colony on Saunders Island was spread along the edge of a cliff. Their nests, reused each year, are tidy pillars of mud and guano up to 20 inches high.
They have an elaborate courtship ritual (worth googling), which they begin practicing when two or three years old. They don’t actually start breeding until around their 10th year. That sounds old, but not so much when you consider they have a natural lifespan of over 70 years.
The Rockhopper penguin colony was a kilometer further along the coast.
Only a video can do them justice. For the most part, they were clustered in the colony, tending their nests. Occasionally a group began to coalesce, building slowly to a critical mass that, after many false starts, made a beeline to another part of the colony, or to the ocean.
They would go faster and faster, progressing from a fast waddle to big leaps.
They have a Groucho Marx eyebrow thing going on, lending to their overall comical appearance. They were a treat to observe, another highlight of the adventure.
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