It was beyond words how awesome today was to see the wildlife up close thriving in their natural environments. The island is home to over 200,000 pairs of king penguins, 3 million royal penguins, 80,000 seals, as well as rock hopper and gentoo penguins, and grey headed, black browed, wandering and light mantled sooty albatrosses. Macquarie Island has been a santuary since 1933 and a world heritage site since 1997. It has been a permanently manned research station since 1948.
It was a privilege to be one of only a thousand people that get to come here each year. It was great getting to know the rangers and learning more about the island and wildlife and I think they were stocked to have visitors with all of them having been posted here for almost a year.
At the southern end of the island we cruised across Lusitania bay in zodiacs where 120,000 king penguins were roosting. The sheer size of that many penguins in one spot was incredible with every bit of bare earth covered. In the water and around the ship the water was alive with king, royal and several rock hoppers and gentoo penguins, every where you looked there was another one popping up. The king penguins especially came towards the boat to fulfil their curiosity. As we cruised along in the boat, disturbed penguins would scatter in front of us and start porpoising.
Amongst the penguins were the historical digesters used to steam up to 2000 penguins at a time to obtain their oil for lighting and machine lubrication. Half a litre per penguin.
Sandy Bay was by far the highlight which had both an inland royal penguin colony and beach front king penguin colony. As soon as you sat down king penguins from all directions would come right up to you and look at you, peck your gumboots and walk around you. They were as curious as we were to see them and keep following me even when I tried to leave them. Keeping the 5m distance rule was impossible as they keep breaking it : ). The royals didn’t come up to you but would happily go about their day and walk past you on their way to and from the beach. There was a penguin highway used to get up and down to the nesting spot. At the colony it was complete chaos with some chicks huddling together in what was like a creche, other chicks begging their parents for food, adults fighting, some sleeping, pairs doing courtship displays, others going to the sea to feed, giant petrels flying overhead trying to get take unprotected chicks, and a huge racket throughout.
There were several harems of female elephant seals (some moulting) and few males as they had already gone back to sea. They were a lot bigger than I had imagined and the noise they made a farting like noise was very strange. Someone described them as giant slugs which was a perfect fit for them.
As we move further south it gets dark later and later each night up until 11pm at the moment and when we get to Antarctica we should get 24 hours light.
LUSITANIA BAY
SANDY BAY
A skua having a feed of penguin - just part of nature.
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