12/23/2022 Brown Bluff

 9:06 PM and the sun is high in the sky.  It is a beautiful ending to a marvelous day.  We woke this morning to bright sunshine.  Some of our friends stayed up last night to see the sunset.  They failed.  It never set.

I went ashore In the Zodiac with a “wet landing.”  This means that the Zodiac pulls up as far as it can onto the pebbly beach, we scoot along the side of the zodiac as far as we can, swing our legs over the side and are helped down into 6 -8 inches of water. It does not sound too bad if you have long legs.  Let’s just say that I need some help getting out.

As we traveled from the ship to the shore, we were accompanied by dozens of penguins bobbing in and out of the water and back in.  They seemed to be having a great time, but the water was a bit too cold for me to try it.

We stepped ashore and immediately saw hundreds of penguins standing, walking and paying no attention to us.  This pebbly beach is home to breeding colonies of Gentoo and Adelie penguins.  The crew marked off areas around the nesting areas so we would not disturb them.  However, they really did not seem to pay attention to us at all.

A penguin “nest”, remember that they are birds, is a                                                                         pile of rocks on a rocky beach. 

 

The female lays 2 eggs, usually, and sits or lies on them until the chicks hatch.  They seem to be about 6 inches long.  In the next few days, they will peek out from under Mom and them scoot back to warmth.  You may see just a head sticking out.  As they grow, they venture out into the open, but stay close to the mother.

The first nesting area we saw was Gentoo penguins.  There were a lot of Adelie penguins near the shore, but they were not welcome in the nesting area. 

These Gentoo penguins are about 42 inches tall.

This cute fellow, an Adelie, is about 36 inches tall.

Further along the shore we come to the Adelie penguin nesting area.  Here the chicks were older, about the size of a mallard duck, but still covered by downy feathers.  Their backs were grey rather than black, and they still stayed close to the nest.  

We did see a couple of “adolescent” penguins, about half the size of the adults.  You could recognize them by their grayer backs and very short tails.

The penguins went about their business as if it were any normal day.  I wonder how humans would react if several dozen creatures five times their size showed up and wandered around staring at us and taking pictures.

It was about 37 degrees Fahrenheit today, so we enjoyed the warmth, the sunshine and the penguins.

 

Darrell & I went on a ride on the Special Operations Boat before dinner.  We saw penguins sitting on icebergs, several kinds of birds and more massive icebergs.

 

 

This iceberg had tipped when a lot of the underwater part had melted.

 

 

One had several deep cracks running through it.  Our guide told us that it would probably soon split into several parts.  You do not want to be near it when that happens since it creates a huge wave, easily capable of capsizing a Zodiac.

The mountain above our landing site is an extinct volcano -a young one, probably only a million years old.