Category — Penguins

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.

Prion Island is a small island just off the coast of South Georgia, a much-larger island probably best known as the resting place of Ernest Shackleton.

It’s not easy to get to Prion Island, nor cheap. You need a boat to get you there, typically an Antarctic tourism vessel.

I hope to visit these parts one day and not just because they’re home to many thousands of King Penguins.

They are also home to the Wandering Albatross. No other bird has a wider wingspan and no other bird is as captivating to watch as it soars on the Antarctic air currents.

You can get a taste for Prion Island (and the Albatross) in this video:

The Tourist Trail tells the story Magellanic penguin researchers and anti-whaling activists. And though the book is fiction, the stories themselves reflect all-to-real events happening right now around the world.

I read this morning that Japan had suspended whaling activities due to harassment from the Sea Shepherd Society. This is amazing news, though Japan could very well start up again at any moment. Paul Watson and his organization have made it clear that when governments fail to enforce a law — illegal poaching in protected waters — civilians don’t have to sit back helplessly. Ordinary people are making a difference every day protecting all types of animals all around the world. I will meet many of these people at the FARM event this July — more on that later.

The bad news I read this morning has to do with Magellanic penguins. A group of 20 have been shipped to a zoo in the US. These were beached penguins, starved and probably close to death. Brazilians had rescued them and now were committing them to a life in zoos. I’m assuming that these penguins could not have been returned to the wild — I’m certainly hoping that’s the case. Its comforting to think that penguins will enjoy a life in the zoo, but I’m not so sure anymore. These birds go from traveling a hundred miles in any given day to doing laps in what amounts to a bathtub. Sure, they get food for life and they are free of predators and oil spills. But when you see penguins in their native environment it’s just hard to see them in a zoo. And it’s harder still to think that their native environment is disappearing, the food becoming more elusive. That’s what appears to be happening right now, as penguins venture further from home in search of food, ensuring more beachings and more tenants at the local zoo.

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.

Petermann Island, situated halfway down the Antarctic Peninsula, is the home to both Gentoo and Adélie penguin colonies.

I was fortunate to have visited this island as part of a tour group many years ago. And it was there that I met the researchers with Oceanities, a non-profit group that has been counting the penguins on this island (and others) for many years.

Counting penguins may seem like a simple task, but it is anything but — as you can see this in the video released by Oceanities and its sponsoring tour operator Lindblad. I recommend having a look.

Here are some factoids from the video:

• Penguins have the highest density of feathers of any other living bird.
• The Adélie has 100 feathers per square inch.
• Adélie nests have decreased in number on Petermann Island by 5% over the past year, while the Gentoo nests have increased.
• This is likely due to the change in climate. The western half of the Antarctic Peninsula has seen temps rise 5 degrees celsius in 50 years. Adélie penguins are true Antarctic penguins, like the Emperor, so it’s possible — or likely — that the warmth is having a negative impact.

It is because of the penguin counters that we know this.

In my novel The Tourist Trail I write about a penguin counter based in Patagonia. Her penguin of choice is the Magellanic and her weather conditions much less severe, but the data she is gathering is just as valuable. Penguins have much to tell us about the state of the oceans and the future of our planet.