Ask anyone to name an Antarctic bird and nine times out of ten they’ll answer ‘penguin’. It’s hardly a surprise really: few birds have better PR than penguins, and you’d have to have a heart of stone to be immune to their charms. So when I travelled south to the ice it was impossible not to have them near the top of my wishlist of things I wanted to see.
But I’m also a keen birdwatcher, so I knew that Antarctica would be more than just penguins. I went prepped with my field guide and binoculars hoping to see some amazing species on both the Antarctic Peninsula and the voyage across the Southern Ocean. And from petrels to prions to some spectacular albatrosses, that’s exactly what I found.
Birdwatching
Both of my parents are keen birdwatchers. When I was a teenager, our holidays changed from going to places where we’d see birds to going somewhere purely for birdwatching. Sometimes we would rough it and sometimes we would stay in nice places, but birds were always the key focus.
We’ve travelled the world with it. Costa Rica was the first place where I really had my mind blown, but since then we’ve migrated on our own wings to Sri Lanka, Ghana and Australia, all in search of birds. In some ways I make a poor sort of twitcher (I’ve never bothered to maintain a life list, for a start), but I’ve always got my binoculars to hand and the eBird app on my phone, and as I flew down to Ushuaia to join my voyage on the expedition cruise ship Seaventure, I was excited to see what awaited me.
It’s probably important to note that for the keenest of birdwatchers, Antarctica is a slightly different proposition to many ornithological destinations. In some parts of the tropics, you might easily hope to spot 50 or more species in a single day. In the far south, you’re not looking at even that many species in total. But here, the focus is on quality rather than quantity. And Antarctica is such an immersive experience, the birds inevitably become just part of a much larger whole. To mangle a cliché, the journey to see the birds is just as important as ticking them off a list.
Penguins & more penguins
We’ll start with those key charismatics. Because yes, I couldn’t help it: I fell in love with the penguins. We had landings at gentoo penguin and chinstrap penguin colonies, and saw Adelies out on the ice floes. As I had sailed in early November when the penguins were returning to breed after a long dark winter, there was plenty of courtship behaviour on display on land, though there was still a little too much snow covering the ground to see them stealing rocks from each other to build their nests.
If that sounds the sort of thing a hardcore twitcher would complain about, I should point out that seeing Antarctica when it’s still dressed in thick snow was a complete delight. And the way the chinstraps would throw back their necks to call, you get the impression that they didn’t mind too much either.
That’s the thing I discovered about penguins. They have such amazing personalities: it was hard not to hear their calls as anything but expressions of joy. I think there are certain bird species in the world where you can really tell their character, and that’s as exciting to me as finding a rare migrant in your back garden that’s been blown in on a strange wind. Well, almost. But you could definitely say I bought the Kool-Aid when it came to the penguins.
Snow white plumage
Another reason to love the early season was it meant that I got to see one species that was particularly high on my wishlist: the snow petrel. They’re incredibly special and very, very beautiful. A pure white seabird is rare – only the ivory gull up in the Arctic can really compare, but even that doesn’t have the snow petrel’s minimalist back eye and bill, as if an artist had decided to finish their creation with a dab of India ink.
Snow petrels are normally found further south and further inland, but the cold start of the season sees them up at the top of the Peninsula, at the edge of the ice. There was something slightly unworldly about them, flitting like ghosts in front of the icebergs rather than follow our ship like other petrels. They were impossibly graceful.
One species that definitely liked our ship was the pale-faced sheathbill, also known as snowy sheathbills. They’re probably the strangest looking birds you’ll see in Antarctica: you can only really describe them as being like a cross between a pigeon and a chicken, and the only bird you’ll find in Antarctica that doesn’t have webbed feet: something that makes them look strangely out of place.
Sheathbills make their living as scavengers and have sharp curious minds, which is why they’d land on the ship to see if there was something to eat, pecking about like pigeons in a town centre. Old Antarctic hands seem to call sheathbills all sorts of pejorative names, but again I loved them. Birds with personality!
Birds of the Drake Passage
While the birds we saw when we were on the Peninsula were one thing, the other part of the trip that I was particularly looking forward to was the actual voyage across the Drake Passage. True, it carries a bit of a reputation for lively weather, but big seas and strong winds are perfect conditions for spotting the most exciting seabirds in the world: albatrosses.
Ironically, on our voyage from Ushuaia to the Peninsula we very much experienced the ‘Drake Lake’, with just three metres of swell and barely a breath of wind. This was good on many levels: we made really good time to Antarctica, and my lingering fears over seasickness quickly evaporated. But my inner birdwatcher was longing for the wind to pick up a little bit. More wind means better conditions for dynamic soaring – that clever and effortless technique that albatrosses use to roam the oceans with barely a twitch of their wings.
So I was overjoyed when our Expedition Leader Hannah, herself a keen ornithologist pulled me aside as we left the Peninsula to say that the weather forecast was showing that the wind was gathering strength, and that if we were up before breakfast, we’d stand a strong chance of all the albatrosses (and petrels and more) we could wish for.
This is exactly where the experience of the expedition guides comes into play. Hannah had been working on polar cruise ships for over 20 years, so had a keen sense of when something interesting might be about to happen. And early the next morning, it did.
Within moments of stepping out on the deck, I saw pintados, or Cape Petrels, daintily swinging over the caps of the waves. One or two Wilson’s storm petrels were with them. And then, the albatrosses appeared, each more elegant than the last.
There were black-browed albatrosses, light-mantled albatrosses and grey-headed albatrosses. Watching them was like watching a ballet, as they gracefully dipped and soared, sometimes coming close to the ship and then zooming away on a crosswind until they were almost out of sight, and then doing it again.
Capturing the moment
The rest of the Drake Passage was like this. With my field guide and a few pointers from Hannah, I grappled with the distinction between northern and southern giant petrels, and Antarctic and broad-billed prions. There were southern fulmars, and as we approached the Beagle Channel, dolphins gulls. And to my joy, a royal albatross. This one was a sub-adult: like people their colouring gets whiter as they mature, starting off with almost completely dark plumage, which whitens until the oldest birds have just the edges of their wings set off in black.
Before the trip, I’d invested in a new 600mm lens for my camera, and it was on the Drake that it really earned its place in my luggage. It’s always been an important part of my birdwatching to try and capture a good photo, and often enjoy the challenge as much as the bird I’m seeing.
And the albatrosses and petrels were definitely a challenge. Tracking them with binoculars was sometimes difficult enough, but getting them focussed in a frame was another thing altogether. We had light, we had time and we had plenty of potential subjects but putting them altogether in a single moment took a lot of practice. People who just photograph birds perched on branches don’t know how easy they’ve got it.
Speaking to the expedition photographer Willie, he told me that the new generation of AI focus cameras had completely transformed his experience. You still need to get the bird in the frame, but once you’re tracking it, the focus is almost instant. Comparing our shots, the difference was immediately apparent.
So that’s the next investment for my next trip south. Because yes, for a birdwatcher, there always has to be a next trip. I ticked off 20 species, but there are definitely more to be had. We saw a royal albatross, but its noble cousin, the wandering albatross always seemed to be somewhere out of sight, just over the horizon.
And when I go back, maybe I’ll finally have started to compile that life list of mine. A wandering albatross would be the perfect bird to christen it with.
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