The little birds stood upright among the rocks, as though dressed in black tie formal, waiting for something. I climbed 400 feet up the rocky mountain at the island’s center, past one group of penguins after another. Melted into the surface of the ice here and there are straight yellow or orange lines, each a couple feet long–evidence that despite its small stature and low undercarriage, the gentoo penguin can pee like a race horse. The restless waddling and sliding of these 18-inch birds has worn grooves two feet deep into the ice–creating a penguin highway that leads down to the beach. As I walk across the ice platform that I climbed onto, it becomes clear that these penguins have made themselves at home here. It involved climbing onto an overhanging platform of ice, several feet thick, which covered this part of the island.īetween 500 and 1,000 gentoo penguins live on the mostly bare, rocky, northwestern half of Danco Island. After all of that, this first step onto land was hard-won. It was our first time setting foot on land since sailing across the Drake Passage from Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula–a journey that took three days. I had just climbed off a Zodiac, waded in tall rubber boots through a foot of frigid sea water, and then scrambled ashore. It is late summer on Danco Island, a small postage stamp of land just off the coast of Antarctica. local time, March 14, 2016, Post #3Ī flurry of snowflakes swirls past in the cold morning air-at least they look like snow-but I soon realize they’re actually penguin feathers, lofted by wind from the colony of stinky birds nesting a few yards away.
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