Perfect penguins
Being surrounded by the same colony of King Penguins as Sir David Attenborough is a moment Ruth will never forget
Being surrounded by a colony of King Penguins is a magical moment that will be etched in Ruth Miller’s memory forever
They were lined up along the entire length of the beach as we approached, a continuous barrier of bodies facing out to sea. More bodies pressed in behind them, pushing the frontline forwards to the wave-line. Behind them, yet another line of heads appeared over the top of the tussock grass as more approached. And behind them, stretching away into the distance were even more, thousands of them covering every available patch of land. Was this a battle scene from Lord of the Rings? No, we were in the presence of royalty: King Penguins!
We were clearly outnumbered here, so we sailed our Zodiac further along the beach of St Andrew’s Bay on South Georgia to find a clear area to land. We jumped ashore and grabbed cameras and binoculars to head back towards the birds.
Behind the sandy beach was a flat plain of short grass with clumps of tussock grasses, and behind this rose stark snowcovered mountains and the blue ice of three mighty glaciers. These glaciers once reached the sea, but are retreating over time, leaving the flat land that the wildlife of South Georgia has been quick to colonise.
It was spring in the Southern Hemisphere and there was plenty of activity going on in this, the breeding season. Antarctic Fur Seals were dotted across the plain at regular intervals, each male holding a precise territory and ready to eject intruders, both seal and human. We clung to the line of red marker flags placed by our expedition guides to ensure a safe passage through them, though a few leery youngsters tested our mettle with a mock charge as we passed.
There’s safety in numbers, as the penguins had found, and keeping close together with our arms above our heads, we halted their charges. Immense male Southern Elephant Seals, 20ft long leviathan beachmasters in control of large territories and a harem of females, were also here but showed no interest in us as we hastened on towards the penguin colony.
In the middle of a colony
Do you recall that David Attenborough moment as he sits on the ground and is immediately surrounded by penguins?
I’d dreamt for years of seeing King Penguins for myself and now here I was right in the middle of the very same King Penguin colony as Sir David.
All around me were thousands of these incredible birds, a shifting grey-white-andgold tapestry that stretched across the entire bay. King Penguins were everywhere, so many that it was hard to take in. Initially, I simply gazed in wonder at the spectacle of so many birds in one place, around 250,000 breeding pairs in total or 500,000 individual
adults if you prefer, a huge quantity of biomass in one location.
Gradually, I started to focus on individual birds and notice the details. In the mix of adults were plenty of youngsters to boost those incredible numbers. It takes 14-16 months to rear a King Penguin chick, with adults managing to rear just two chicks over three years. This means the colony will comprise a mix of adults courting, adults with eggs, youngsters, and adults moulting ready to start the breeding season all over again.
The juveniles were easy to see. Round as a barrel and covered in brown fluffy feathers, they were gathered in crèches while their parents fished out at sea. They were curious about the world around them and tended to wander off to explore, looking particularly unstable as they staggered along like drunken sailors in a fight with a feather boa. Upon their return with food, the parents would call constantly to track down their errant chick, who would cheep in reply until each recognised the other’s unique voice, no mean feat in the cacophony of the whole colony.
Adult and chick reunited, the parent would lead the chick a short distance away before regurgitating a meal of nutritious fish and krill.
There was a constant to-ing and fro-ing as the adults waddled to the shore and back with that rolling gait peculiar to penguins. Underfoot was a brown, sticky, almost peaty soil, not an easy surface to walk on, and it dawned on me that the ‘soil’ was in fact a solid mass of penguin poo accumulated over the lifetime of the colony.
Dance of union
The smell is impossible to describe and equally hard to get out of your nostrils for days afterwards. But this was no time for being squeamish; kneeling allowed me to get down to penguin level to watch the cameos of life playing out all around me.
King Penguins heading out to sea had dirty brown stomachs, made even dirtier as they belly-flopped onto the ground to toboggan down the slope to the beach, propelled along by their strong black feet. King Penguins returning from a fishing expedition were pristine: white fronts, grey backs, black faces, with a glorious highlight of gold on the throat and behind the ears.
Reunited with their mates, individuals renewed their bond by sky-pointing and emitting in harmony their bizarre, dualnote buzzing calls. Others would simultaneously stretch and bend their necks to preen their dense waterproof feathers, a co-ordinated dance of union. Some penguins balanced on their heels with toes lifted up as they balanced their precious egg on their feet, protecting it from the cold under a warm flap of softly feathered skin.
Others hissed and stretched out their bills to ward off a Southern Giant Petrel, a predator bird that patrolled the colony on the lookout for an unprotected egg or chick. More Kings waddled right up to us, unafraid and curious about these strange, supersized penguins, in colour co-ordinated yellow parkas who’d visited their island.
It was hard to leave St Andrew’s Bay when our time was up, our visit carefully controlled to limit the human intrusion on this special sub-Antarctic island. But we took away thousands of penguin photos, millions of unforgettable memories and a lingering waft of penguin poo up our nostrils.
Ruth Miller is one half of The Biggest Twitch team, and along with partner Alan Davies, set the then world record for most bird species seen in a year – 4,341, in 2008, an experience they wrote about in their book, The Biggest Twitch. Indeed, Ruth is still the female world record-holder! As well as her work as a tour leader, she is the author of the Birds, Boots and Butties books, on walking, birding and tea-drinking in North Wales, and previously worked as the RSPB’s head of trading. She lives in North Wales. birdwatchingtrips.co.uk