The ship was a bit spartan, but after a period of adaptation, satisfactory.
Lindblad Explorer carried a number of lecturers. They are specialists in various disciplines and there are daily lectures about various aspects of the things which we were about to see, or had seen. Talks on the mechanics of glaciers, about sea mammals and birds, the history of Antarctica, from the first exploration to the latest are all parts of this tour.
Getting into all those pieces of clothing in a small space was quite interesting, but we learned. The boots were the most difficult, as they had to be donned after the trousers, and the waistline bulk made it difficult to lean over to lace them up. We looked like teddy bears.
The first beach we landed on had penguins galore, of the chinstrap variety. They have one marking which gives them their name, a black strap of feathers which goes under their bills. Think of a dark sandy beach with small surf breaking on it, rocks on each side, and several harems of seals lying around, and dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of penguins and you have the picture. Penguins walking into the surf, penguins returning from their fishing expeditions, walking around and paying little or no attention to us as we walked up to see the rookery. If you got down to something approaching their level (about knee height) they might just walk right up to you, inspect you, turn their backs, and walk off. One inspected us, first with one eye, then with the other, turned his (her) back, waggled its tail, and stalked off.
(I got too close to one of the seals and was chased off by the master of the harem. It must have been quite a spectacle, me flying off in those heavy boots and clothing-very slowly, as it was impossible to move very fast-chased by a seal.)
We hiked back into the rookery, through a small stream of very cold water, just barely melted, accompanied by penguins. Those poor little creatures walk about a mile to go fishing, for the purpose of feeding their young.
The penguin walk is quite clumsy, but they have another method of locomotion on snow. They flop down on their bellies and toboggan, which is relatively fast.
They sometimes cluster in groups on rocks at the water’s edge, trying to decide whether to go into that water at all. When the cluster reaches a certain size, one brave individual will dive into the water, then most of the others follow. Then another group congregates, and they go through it all again. When returning, they get smashed against rocks, eventually mount them, and proceed awkwardly to their young.
Locomotion in water is by means of porpoising. Up and down, each time garnering some krill for their food, then presently they return to feed the young.
Their white fronts are often dirty with the pink color of the krill, but mostly the white is spotlessly clean. Penguin nests are built, of small stones, which they shamelessly steal from each other. One experimenter put a stack of small stones painted red in one corner of a colony, and when he returned, the red stones were scattered all over the colony. One mating habit is for the male to give his chosen a small stone. Another is for two birds to stretch their necks straight upward, making mating sounds.
Rookeries are quite noisy and rather dirty with guano. (And smelly, as well.) However, we found ourselves quite taken with those birds and their ways. After hatching from the egg, the baby penguin is covered with down, which it keeps for some time, shedding it in favor of the fancy dress. Some varieties leave the young with a nursemaid when they are off fishing, and you can see aggregations of those very young birds together. I watched one of the nurseries-the “nursemaid” kept after any stragglers, chivvying them back into the group, where they stayed until the parents returned.
Leopard seals eat penguins, when they catch them swimming. So one encounters orphaned baby birds. Skuas will eventually eat those. Rookeries can be vast; one we saw was estimated by experts to have about a million birds in it.