My journey: The Falklands
Now a popular cruise stop thanks to its abundant wildlife, the windswept Falklands offer home comforts too, says Mark Stratton
They mill around like a convention of unemployed black-tie waiters. A golden ruff of feathers taints their crisp white shirt frontage like a stain of slopped treacle.
Part of a spectacle of hundreds of pairs of nesting king penguins, the adults are preening grey fluffy chicks who force themselves into the cosy warmth between their parents legs. Intermittently the penguins aim their bills skywards and ululate a piercing call that resonates across Volunteer Point beach.
“Nearly a thousand king penguin pairs will raise their chicks here between November and April,” says my guide, Patrick Watts. He had driven me to their colony in his trusty old Land-Rover.
Of all the Sub-Antarctic islands the Falkland Islands is the most accessible destination to enjoy the South Atlantic’s stellar wildlife. This redoubtable British Overseas Territory has a tiny capital, called Stanley, where Union Jacks fly alongside red Royal Mail boxes.
The Falklands have become a major cruise destination where passengers make excursions in zodiacs to access this wildlife. But to really spend serious time with beach-loads of penguins and access quaint old-fashioned Falkland hospitality I am spending a week island-hopping around this frost-shattered archipelago.
“Hold tight, this landing can loosen a few fillings,” quipped Andrew the FIGAS (Falkland Island Government Air Service) pilot as Bleaker Island comes into view.
We have already dipped low during this flight from Stanley, to briefly follow a pod of killer-whales.
I am welcomed onto Bleaker by Mike and Phyllis Rendell, the island’s sole residents. They offer cosy hospitality at Cassard House, which backs onto their small farm. With homemade cake and biscuits served for afternoon tea in between hearty main meals I need a walk to avoid becoming as lethargically obese as the gigantic elephants seals I’d see over the week. And that’s
what most visitors do on these windswept islands. Simply take off for the day and marvel at wildlife every bit as approachable as that of the Galapagos.
Bleaker’s penguin antics soon catch my eye. The Falklands is estimated to have around 1.17million of them – about 292 penguins to every inhabitant.
I walk to a golden beach at Sandy Bay and see Magellanic penguins rushing around seemingly scared of their own shadows. They run as if joined at the hip, sometimes stumbling and plummeting face down into the sand. Gentoo penguins meanwhile are bolder.
Battle of survival
Later, near Cassard House on Bleaker’s treeless grasslands, I marvel at one of the world’s largest colonies of imperial cormorants. Like the king penguins of Volunteer Point these tall black fishing birds huddle together to nurture their young. But I am also privy to a dramatic battle of survival, as if standing on the set of a nature documentary. Aggressive Antarctic Skuas, with slicing curved bills dive-bomb the colony, picking off the defenceless chicks that cannot fly. I watch and grimace as several are taken amid a raucous barrage of warning calls. This is nature at its rawest.
After two-nights the FIGAS Cessna arrives with new passengers and collects me for a short hop to Sea-lion Island.
The lodge owner tells me they’d recently saved a baby orca that had beached, leaving a frantic mother offshore, helpless.
After they had returned the calf to the sea the mother waved her flippers towards her child’s rescuers as if in gratitude.
I sit on the tussocky grass of the sea-cliff, watching the madcap antics of diminutive rockhopper penguins, with their big yellow eyebrows and mohican-style crests.
True to their name the rockhoppers bounce two-footed between ledges of a rocky sea-cliff until they are close enough to spring into the choppy South Atlantic. It looks painful and dangerous and completely nonsensical: a hundred yards
or so away is a soft sandy beach with easy access to the ocean.
Twitcher’s paradise
Less active is the colony of male elephant-seals loafing around on the western coast’s beach close to the lodge.
These two-tonne colossus of wrinkled flab inertly huddle together dozing, their great bulbous elephantine noses flaring.
They groan and snore and occasionally rear-up with irritation, blubber slapping together until overcome with effort and deflating back down onto the beach.
“They are tired after mating,” says Filippo, an Italian researcher I meet later at dinner.
My next stop is on Carcass Island, a 17 sq km outpost that offers one of the greatest birding experiences on earth.
The island is named after a 19th-century British warship, HMS Carcass, says Rob McGill, a farmer who houses guests at his homestead.
From Rob’s farm a fishing boat takes me to the uninhabited West Point Island where forbidding sea cliffs of wetted basalt house a large colony of blackbrowed albatross – the globetrotter of the skies.
I sit among the colony, near a mother preening a chick the size of a Christmas turkey. The tip of a giant wing brushes my head and I feel touched in more ways than one by the magnificence of the Falkland’s fearless wildlife.