Wildlife - January 10-26

The food chain down here is pretty basic. Plankton, krill (small shrimp), and small fish are at the bottom. The penguins, birds, whales, and some seals feed on these guys. At the top of the chain are Leopard seals and Killer whales, they would eat seals and penguins – killer whales also killing other larger whales just to eat their tongues.

As you can see from some of our pictures, we had lots of opportunities to see penguins, seals and whales up close. There are about six different types of penguins down here, and all of them had chicks of various ages – newborn to about 1 month old - in their little stone nests. One of the biggest challenges of the trip was to convince Andrea that she really could just watch the penguins and not take 500 photos of every single colony we came across.

One of our most exciting experiences was during a kayaking trip one afternoon. The sailboat had long left us and we were by ourselves paddling. Two humpback whales came up to within about 50 metres from us for quite some time. As Andrea said, “In October I was riding elephants chasing rhinos, and three months later I am in a kayak chasing whales…go figure……”