Antarctica Trip, January, 2017

Tom Davis & Ellyn Bush

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The Itinerary

Antarctica had been on our "list" for quite some time, but when we finally began to plan the trip, we decided that since it is a long way from home, we should see more of the southern world than just Antarctica. We signed up for a tour with the Stanford Alumni organization on an expedition that included not only the Antarctic peninsula but also the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas, according to Argentina), and South Georgia Island.

Although Stanford organized the trip, the ship and crew, were run by Zegrahm, so there were lots of other people on the ship. Victor Emmanuel Nature Tours (VENT), a touring company that caters primarily to birders, also used Zegrahm. Stanford and VENT each had about 40 participants and the rest signed up directly with Zegrahm.

Ellyn and I are interested in birds and bird photography, but we usually don't go on trips with tours like the VENT trip. But we were very happy to have them along, guaranteeing that those of us interested in birds would not be slighted. Also, I've included a few photos that are not great, but are the best (or only) photo I got of that species. In general, if the thumbnail on this page looks crappy, so will be the enlarged version.

Here is a map of the proposed trip:

We were warned, and it turned out to be true, that due to weather, et cetera, the route might be changed and we might visit other sites, but we would follow the general path as shown above.

Since we would pass through Buenos Aires, Argentina, we also decided to stop there for a few days to do some birding and then to join the Stanford group in Ushuaia, Argentina.

This page contains some photos and descriptions of the trip beginning in Ushuaia. Almost all the photos are just thumbnails and larger versions can be obtained by clicking on them.

January 7: Ushuaia

It's amazing how efficient the use of the ship (the Ocean Diamond) was. It arrived in the morning, disembarked all the passengers from the previous trip, refueled, cleaned up, and reloaded all the provisions necessary for our 20-day trip. The same thing was done at the end of our trip: by that evening at 4:00, they were ready to take on a completely new load of guests for the next trip.

The rest of the bird photos in this section were taken on the birding trip in Ushuaia on the morning before we boarded our ship. Our group was a bit too large for a normal birding expedition with about 40 people, spread onto two busses but in spite of that we did see a lot. (With a huge group, mostly moving along trails, quite often a bird is seen by the people/guide at the front and by the time the 40-th person gets there, the bird is often gone.

Upland Goose (Chloephaga hybrida)

Female Magellanic Woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus) This was the bird we were most interested to see in Ushuaia. It is huge: about the size of the Imperial Woodpecker and the extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker (14 to 18 inches in length). This is the female which finally landed in good light. Later I got a photo of the male, but he was deep in the woods and I never got a really clear shot. See below.

When one of the guests spotted her for the first time, he shouted, "Holy Mackerel!"

Male Magellanic Woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus) This is a crappy shot, but at least it's recognizable.

Ashy-headed Goose (Chloephaga poliocephala)

Upland Goose (Chloephaga picta)

Upland Goose (Chloephaga picta)

White-tufted Grebe (Podiceps rolland)

Dark-bellied Cincloides (Cincloides patagonicus)

Dolphin Gull (Leucophaeus scoresbii )

Crested Duck (Anas specularioides)

Southern Wigeon (Anas sibilatrix)

Ellyn on the Ocean Diamond, with Ushuaia in the distance

We had just sailed, and you can see the city and some of the mountains behind her. These mountains essentially mark the southern end of the Andes.

Ushuaia harbor

Here's a photo without the boat that contains a better view of Ushuaia and the mountains behind it.

End of the Earth

This sign marks the southernmost end of the Pan-American Highway that (in theory) runs all the way from Alaska to the southern tip of South America. In fact, there is a small gap in the highway from southern Panama to Colombia. The area is heavy jungle and it make road building there difficult. Today it would surely be possible to build a road, but the completion of the road might make drug trafficking easier.

In any case, there's still a gap, called the "Darien Gap." Ellyn and I have visited the Panamanian "middle end" of the Pan American Highway on another birding trip.

January 8: At Sea

The albatrosses were relatively slow-moving and easy to photograph, but the smaller birds were quite fast and flew more irregularly. Just as a point of reference, the photos in this web page represent the best of about 7000 photos that were taken. Of the 6000-odd photos that didn't make the cut, most were blurry bird photos (and then at the end, there were too many cool iceberg photos, and I picked just a few of the more interesting ones).

When we spent days at sea, there were always a few lectures (mostly about an hour long) on wildlife, history, geology, climate change, et cetera, all related to the area we were currently traveling in. Zegrahm provided a bunch of entertaining and knowledgable speakers and the Stanford professor (Rob Dunbar) also spoke often.

In addition, almost every evening before dinner was a "recap" of the day's events, a discussion of the proposed activity for the next day, and usually some other hilarity. It was usually accompanied by appetizers and wine, so it was worth attending.

And speaking of "before dinner," there was more food than you can imagine. I joked about eating "nine square meals per day." If you woke up early, there was a pre-breakfast "coffee and pastries," then an enormous breakfast with every kind of breakfast food you can imagine, and an hour and a half to eat it. Lunch was the same, but then there were sandwiches and pastries at about 4:00, the recap with appetizers and booze, then a giant dinner, and finally there were chocolates on your pillow at night. Well, that's not quite nine meals, but I was never hungry.

I had promised some of my "fans" at home that I'd do a "Polar Plunge" -- jumping off a perfectly good ship into icy polar waters -- and so I rationalized eating as much as possible in order to build up a sufficient layer of blubber to survive the plunge. Here is my Polar Plunge.

Slender-billed Prion (Pachyptila belcheri)

Wilson's Storm-Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus)

Royal Albatross (Diomedea epomophora)

Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris)

January 9: Falkland Islands (Saunders Island and West Point)

The first stop at Saunders Island was great! We saw four of the five species of penguins we would eventually see on the whole trip. As you can see from the photos below, we saw quite a variety of other birds and animals.

The Fur Seals were a little aggressive so we gave them their space. Apparently the mating season for the Elephant Seals was over, so they didn't seem to care about us, one way or the other.

Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua papua)

Magellanic Oystercatcher (Haematopus leucopodus)

Dolphin Gull (Larus scoresbii)

Striated Caracara (Phalcoboenus australis)

Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)

Magellanic Penguin (Sphenicus magellanicus)

Magellanic Penguin (Sphenicus magellanicus)

Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)

Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)

Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris)

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura falklandicus)

Antarctic Shag (Phalacrocorax purpurascens)

Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua papua)

Magellanic Oystercatcher (Haematopus leucopodus)

Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua papua)

Greater Kelp Goose (Chloephaga hybrida malvinarum)

Ruddy-headed Goose (Chloephaga rubidiceps)

Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome)

Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris)

Austral (Falkland) Thrush Turdus falcklandii falcklandii)

Sei Whale Skeleton

January 10: Falkland Islands (Stanley)

Ellyn and I do some geocaching (she more than I), and we made sure to find at least one cache in Stanley. (It was pretty easy: there was one that was about 30 meters from where the bus dropped us off in town.)

If geocaching is new to you, here's the main geocaching website.

One feature of the geocaching game is called a "travel bug": a small item that is placed in a cache somewhere with a goal. The goal is often a place that the bug "wants" to visit, and when it is encountered by a geocacher, if that geocacher thinks he/she can advance it toward the goal, they pick it up and deposit it closer to the goal. Ellyn had a travel bug that had started in Slovakia and "wanted" to get to Antarctica. The bug itself was a small metal penguin with instructions attached to it. It had been all across Europe and finally made it to the US and eventually to California when Ellyn got it. The penguin was able to "visit" the site in Stanley, and whenever a travel bug visits a site, the originator of the bug is notified. The bug had previously visited a cache in Buenos Aires, so the Slovakian owner must have been getting more excited.

To see how Tux the Traveler (the penguin travel bug) is doing, just google "TB5Q2PA."

January 11-12: At Sea

January 13: South Georgia Island (Grytviken and Fortuna Bay)

Tom washing his boots for biosecurity

We spent about three days visiting various places on South Georgia Island. There was a very strong storm from the south, so we visited sites primarily on the north side of the island and were able to avoid the worst of it. We also visited the sites in a seemingly random order, again to minimize the storm's impact. All in all, we were able to land at lots of places and saw lots and lots of historic sites and wildlife.

Ellyn and Wandering Albatross

This is in the small museum in Grytviken. You can read in the books that the wingspan of a Wandering Albatross is "10 to 11 feet," but when you see them in the air from a ship, it is really hard to tell just how big they are since there is usually nothing you can use as a size reference, and you can't really tell how far away they are. This stuffed Wandering Albatross above Ellyn makes the comparison easy.

Antarctic Fur Seal (Arctocephalus gazella)

Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

Grytviken Church

Grytviken Boilers

Grytviken was a huge whale processing site in the early twentieth century, and the remains of the station are all here.

Whaling Ship

Note the canon at the bow for shooting exploding harpoons into the whales.

Shackleton's Grave

Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata)

South Polar Skua (Stercorarius maccormici)

Antarctic Fur Seal (Arctocephalus gazella)

Apparently it isn't just dolphins that swim by "dolphining." Here's a fur seal doing it, and right below, a king penguin swimming in the same way. All the penguins we saw tended to do this.

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

Antarctic Tern (Sterna vittata)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus)

The little brown guys are just immature King Penguins. They were called "oakum boys" by the early sailors since their brown downy feathers looked like the oakum material used to caulk leaks in the old wooden sailing ships.

King Penguin Panorama

Click on the thumbnail above to obtain a very high-resolution version of this panorama.

Antarctic Fur Seal (Arctocephalus gazella)

January 14: South Georgia Island (Gold Harbor, Cooper Bay, and Drygalski Fjord)

The guy (gal?) on the right has almost completed its molt to the adult plumage.

First Iceberg

This was the first one we saw. I felt obliged to take a photo, but as you'll see later, this is not the "best" one we saw.

Prions

Snow Petrel (Pagodroma nivea)

Cape (Painted) Petrel (Daption capense)

Ice and Rock

January 15-17: At Sea

White-chinned Petrel (Procellaria aequinoctialis)

January 18: Elephant Island

Our plan was to try to land at the site of the men's camp, but on that day the weather was horrible: 20-foot waves and winds to 70 miles/hour. It was quite difficult to open the doors to the outer decks due to the wind's pressure. We got a few photos of the island, but landing was out of the question. It's hard to imagine what Shackleton's men put up with, for months. We were there in the "best" part of the southern summer. They were not.

Ice and Rock

Here's a photo of the campsite. Pretty grim...

Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)

Black-browed Albatross and Giant Petrel

Wilson's Storm-Petrel (Oceanites oceanicus)

Southern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialoides)

Southern Fulmar and Cape Petrel

Southern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialoides)

Cape (Painted) Petrel (Daption capense)

Chinstrap Penguins and Arctic Terns (?)

Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)

January 19: Deception Island

There were two Zodiac landings on the boat at water level, and in heavy waves one of the Zodiacs dropped below the landing and then a rising wave slammed the rubber covering against a sharp steel corner of the landing and punctured it. Here it's being repaired.

Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)

Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)

Cape (Painted) Petrel (Daption capense)

Chinstrap Penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus)

South Polar Skua (Stercorarius maccormici)

Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangeliae)

January 19: Hannah Point

January 20: Portal Point and Wilhelmina Bay

January 21: Port Lockroy, Cuverville Island, and Andvord Bay

January 22: Lemaire Channel and Paradise Bay

The Polar Plunge

I really needn't have worried so much, since I was into and out of the water so quickly. Afterward, we got a drink of hot chocolate "medicated" with any sort of booze we wanted. I added some Drambuie.

Plunge Photographers

Tom before the Plunge



Tom during the Plunge

Here's my certificate!

Ocean Diamond with Killer Whales

Ocean Diamond

Almirante Brown

This is an Argentinian research station on the Antarctic peninsula. It used to be manned year-around until one year, because they couldn't find a replacement doctor to spend the winter, they tried to force the current doctor to stay over two winters in a row. He really didn't want to, so he burned down the station. A charred piece of wood from the old station is in the small museum there.

Almirante Brown

Killer Whale (Orcinus orca)

Killer Whale (Orcinus orca)

Jan 23-25 At Sea

Cape Horn

Antarctica Panoramas

Antarctica Videos