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Where Oceans Hide Their Dead: Now on Audible.com

ByJohn Yunker

At last, it’s ready… on Audible.com.https://adbl.co/2ZINs6j You can listen to a sample here: Ashland Creek Press · Where Oceans Hide Their Dead (sample) Read by yours truly, warts and all. The end result is 8 hours and change long but I lost count of how many hours I spent recording and re-recording these chapters. Partly…

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The Tourist Trail is now an audiobook

ByJohn Yunker

Let me just that I have newfound respect for those who create audiobooks, because after a month of starts and stops and re-recordings I’m happy to announce the audiobook for The Tourist Trail. It’s available on Audible and comes in at just over 7 hours, which by no means reflects how many hours went into…

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Did you happen to notice the new Tourist Trail cover?

ByJohn Yunker

The cover of the first edition of The Tourist Trail features a landscape photograph of the Magellanic penguin colony along the shores of Argentina, the precise location where the book begins. It was a photograph I had taken and I thought it would make a nice cover. And it did, but it didn’t make a…

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And now some great news for Magellanic penguins

ByJohn Yunker

The Tourist Trail takes place on the site of the world’s largest Magellanic penguin colony and, though the book is fiction, the colony is very much real. It is located on the coast of Punta Tombo, Argentina. And this coastal region has long been heavily fished, which means penguins have for decades been caught up in…

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Bycatch is destroying seabird populations — and that includes penguins

ByJohn Yunker

A recent study reported on in the New York Times found that 400,000 seabirds are getting killed each year by gillnets — those long nets used by fishing vessels. And you can add roughly 160,000 additional seabirds that are hooked by longlines. In short, modern fishing practices are destroying the oceans and its creatures. From…

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The United States vs. The Sea Shepherd Society

ByJohn Yunker

I can’t say I’m surprised this day would come. When I began writing The Tourist Trail in 2008 I envisioned the FBI going after the leader of a fictional anti-whaling group. At the time, the US was largely neutral about the goings-on in the Southern Ocean. This was a matter between the Sea Shepherd and…

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Climate change, not tourism, is hurting chinstrap penguins

ByJohn Yunker

Tourism and its impact on endangered species is, not surprisingly, one of the themes of The Tourist Trail. It’s not a simple issue. In the case of the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, more than 100,000 tourists now visit the site annually, which can (and sometimes does) overwhelm the birds. But the fact that so…

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Thinking about visiting Patagonia?

ByJohn Yunker

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…

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Sometimes the only evidence of an oil spill are its victims

ByJohn Yunker

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…

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The penguins of Punta Tombo, 28 years later

ByJohn Yunker

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…