Category — Patagonia

You should read this travel article about Bahia Bustamante.

Bahia Bustamante is a sprawling private ranch south of Punta Tombo, the site of the world’s largest Magellanic penguin colony. The article nicely captures the environment and its rich diversity of animal life — armadillos, guanacos and even steamer ducks.

Here’s a picture of a pair of steamer ducks that I took when I was at Punta Tombo years ago:

Steamer ducks can’t fly but they can sure zip across the water when provoked.

And here’s a picture of Punta Tombo. Reading that article sent me back through all the photos I had taken.

The highlight of the article was when the author came across some of the local penguins:

We walked into the bushes, slowly and quietly, as inconspicuous as three giants in bright windbreakers could be. Under almost every bush was a penguin nest; in each, two penguins rested on their egg, a portrait of monogamy (they mate for life), looking up as we passed, curious but not afraid. These were Magellanic penguins, each about two feet tall; they are indigenous only to southern Argentina, Chile and the Falkland Islands. (The penguins are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a near-threatened species because of oil spills and overfishing.) When the water gets too frigid, they’ll swim north to the warmer waters of Brazil for a few months before heading back next fall, to this exact island, these exact nests.

I hope to visit Bahia Bustamante some day, though I’d be happy enough just making it back to Punta Tombo.

By the way, there is a small guest ranch, further north, that I was fortunate enough to stay at and I highly recommend it: Rincón Chico. Here’s a nice video of some of the wildlife you can see there.

NPR ran a segment about a recent study that found that the metal wing bands used to tag King penguins put them at a disadvantage in the water.

Penguins fly through the water. It may be difficult to picture an animal that waddles across the land hitting 15 miles per hour in the water, but they do it. And if you think of a penguin as a bird in flight, it’s not hard to imagine how a piece of metal fastened to its wing could slow it down. In the water, speed is everything; penguins depend on their speed to be successful in feeding and to outrun predators.

According to the NPR article, Antarctic researchers:

… put traditional metal bands on 50 King penguins that live near Antarctica. Fifty others had much smaller radio-frequency transponders. Ten years later, the survival rate for banded birds was 16 percent below the unbanded birds.

Yvon Le Maho, the chief biologist, says at first there was little effect. Then during the first 4.5 years, survival rates for the banded birds dropped about 30 percent below the unbanded birds.

“In other words, only the superathletes are surviving,” Le Maho says.

Dee Boersma, a researcher who has been banding Magellanic penguins for 30 years, was also interviewed for the NPR piece. She pointed out that not all penguin bands are created equal. And she stressed that “eliminating all tags would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

Here is a picture of a band used on Magellanic penguins. I placed a pen next to it for context.

I’ve often wondered about the negative effects of penguin bands and satellite transponders. It’s an issue I wrote about in The Tourist Trail.

But I think it’s worth mentioning that these the super-small radio transponders weren’t available ten years ago. Researchers made do with the best technology they had at the time. And the metal bands were the best technology at the time. Looking ahead, I’m sure researchers will take advantage of the smaller tags when they can afford to (funding is always a major obstacle).

It’s also worth mentioning that because of the tags that Dee used (metal bands as well as radio transponders), she has been able to study generations of individual penguins. She knows how long they live, how far they travel in the water, and she knows where they go for food. Without data like this, how do you begin to convince a government to keep ships from traveling through major penguin feeding areas? How do you cordon off feeding areas from fisherman to prevent penguins from getting caught up in the nets?

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from The Tourist Trail (it opens when two researchers, Angela and Doug, are applying a large satellite transponder to a penguin):

What’s the point of tracking them, Doug added, if the act of doing so reduces their numbers?

Fishing nets do more damage than these devices will ever do, Angela told him.

This they knew from the dozens of flipper tags they received each year, mailed anonymously from the fishermen who obeyed the Avise al request stamped on the back of each tag. Some tags arrived carefully flattened out by hammer, easier to slip into an envelope; others arrived intact, little thin triangles. And Angela always wondered how many tags were left on those ships, or at the bottom of the sea.

Her life was consumed with attrition and its causes. The unreported oil spills, evidenced by the blackened, shivering birds that staggered upon the shores. The plastic six-pack rings that doubled as lassos. The baited long lines, meant for large fish but difficult for any species to resist. And the most acute and least visible cause of all—the food supply. Penguins depended on anchovies and krill, once abundant and ignored by fishermen, now in demand at salmon farms and for multivitamins. Like penguins, fishermen aimed for the food nearest to shore, and because they were more efficient and rapacious, penguins were forced to forage farther and farther from their nests, diminishing the odds of a successful return.

More than 200 oil-soaked Magellanic penguins washed ashore in Southern Argentina two weeks ago.

No oil spill was reported. But the penguins are proof enough.

At least 11 penguins have died. But we’re talking about hundreds of miles of coastline, much of it uninhabited. It’s impossible to know exactly how many penguins were affected.

All naturalists can do is rescue the ones that come ashore, shivering and sick. The oil ruins the heat-retention of their feathers. The birds will try to clean themselves and end up ingesting the oil.

These are the penguins I wrote about in The Tourist Trail. The ones that nest along the shores of Punta Tombo.

And this is the type of accident that Angela, the main character, dreads. One oil spill is all it takes to wipe out so many of the penguins she has tracked for years. One oil spill and the colony of penguins gets a little bit smaller, a little bit faster.

To support penguin research, support these organizations:

• The Penguin Project
• Global Penguin Society

Link: Penguin News Today

Punta Tombo, which is located on the Patagonian coast of Argentina, is home to the world’s largest Magellanic penguin colony.

Dee Boersma and her team of naturalists have been studying these penguins for 28 years. Back when she began, the Japanese were planning to harvest the penguins for their fur for women’s gloves.

Fortunately Dee and others intervened. And now the penguins are largely protected (at least while they’re on land).

I received a brief newsletter from Dee today with some key data points from her work.

Here’s the good news:

• Dee and her team first began banding chicks in 1983. And they still track nine of the penguins banded that year.
• The oldest bird tracked is more than 30 years old.
• They have sighted more than 2,900 banded chicks over the years. In some cases, they can track the family tree all the way down to the great-great grand chicks. When Dee began they didn’t know just how loyal these penguins were to the colony or to one another. They know so much more today. This is not just amazing data, it’s a family history.

And now the bad news:

• Penguins are traveling 25 miles further to find food than they did a decade ago. This is not by choice. The food sources have shifted. Every additional mile traveled raises the risk that the chicks waiting back at home could starve (and some do). The colony is shrinking.
• Now, the reasons why the food has shifted is not so clear. Some blame global warming. Oil spills over the years have certainly factored into it as well. But I believe a major culprit is the fishing industry. The food penguins eat — such as squid and krill —  was largely ignored by the fishing industry a decade ago. Today, it’s a cash crop and fisherman are going to take what is closest to shore. Humans and penguins are now competing for the same food and humans, with their sonar and their mile-long nets, are going to win this battle.

Unless we stop them.

Dee has the data. Now we need to raise awareness so that all countries begin treating the oceans like the finite resource they are instead of an all-you-can eat buffet. This was one of the reasons I wrote The Tourist Trail.

The penguins will be returning to Punta Tombo beginning next week.

To support the Penguin Project — and subscribe to their newsletter — click here.

One of the principal characters in The Tourist Trail is a penguin. He goes by the name of Diesel.

Diesel is based on a very real penguin named Turbo.

Turbo is now a celebrity of sorts. He has his own web page — and his own Facebook page. I expect a movie deal is forthcoming.

Why is Turbo so special?

Penguins are largely indifferent to humans, but Turbo is different. He seems to enjoy hanging out with humans. Nobody feeds him, mind you. He’s not in it for the food. And, unlike his brethren, he won’t bite if touched.

I had the pleasure of meeting Turbo several years ago.

Here’s my fictional take on Turbo, aka Diesel:

The first time Angela heard his knock, she’d opened the door, and he’d hobbled over to the bookcase, peering at the Patagonian field guides as if he had a book in mind. His breath was raspy, like a purr, which she had never noticed outdoors on the wind-deafening hills. Angela had stood by the door, holding it open; Emily sat at the desk. They remained motionless as Diesel toured the cramped room, investigating every eye-level oddity—the half-open file cabinet, mud-stained Wellingtons, a pile of knee pads, a fire extinguisher. She imagined him as an explorer among penguins, one given to researching humans. Off alone in the field, sacrificing his childbearing years, all for the greater good of knowledge. What notes would he take? The humans are easily approached, yet spastic in nature and prone to outburts. They seem oddly attracted to Punta Verde. Most visit for a few hours and are gone again. Perhaps the land is of spiritual significance. Tagging them will prove challenging.

Diesel had returned to the bookcase and looked up at Angela. He wasn’t about to leave on his own, and if she could have gone back in time, to that room on that morning, she would have closed the door instead of ushering him back outside.