Into the blue

BEING asked to recount highlights of working in the Antarctic is very difficult because there are so many highlights and it is so difficult to pick the best.

I work for Zegrahm Expeditions, an American wildlife tour company which offers trips to the Antarctic. I am employed as the ornithologist and give lectures on the birds of the region to our guests and also act as a guide throughout the trip. I work as part of a small team of ‘field leaders’ comprising experts in marine biology, geology, climatology and Antarctic history, and I like to think our guests go home as ambassadors for Antarctica and for the need to protect it, after a holiday with a strong educational theme, learning all about the white continent.

We travel during the southern summer in December or January. A trip to the Antarctic is the closest thing you will get to leaving planet earth. It is other-worldly with, for the most part, no evidence of human activity, past or present, and sights, sounds and smells largely alien to the first-time visitor. We do not see a tree or flower for the best part of three weeks. We travel on small cruise ships with no more than 100 passengers, which allows us to go ashore in zodiacs and explore in small groups and get to places other cruise ships cannot. Of course we make every effort to minimise our impact on the places we visit and follow strict international guidelines to ensure we leave Antarctica as we found it.

We embark on our voyage from Ushuaia on the Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, calling to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, Elephant Island, South Orkneys and on to the Antarctic Peninsula.

The scenery is incredible. One of the most surprising highlights for me has been my encounters with ice. We once cruised past a tabular (flat-topped) iceberg that was over 10km long, 8km wide and floating over 60 metres above the sea. Cruising in a zodiac amongst icebergs and ‘bergy bites’ (little icebergs) somewhere like the Weddell Sea on a calm sunny day, is like being in a sculpture park where each piece is so beautiful you cannot pick a favourite. The spellbinding blue glow from some of them is truly memorable and vies for number one highlight with the birds, and that is saying a lot from a long-time fanatical bird watcher like myself!

It is the dream of every bird watcher to see an albatross, a bird whose name has become part of the English language through the verses of Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man who had never seen an albatross when he wrote it and never did subsequently! As I stood on the aft deck of the ship watching one of these giants of the southern oceans slowly weave its way up along our wake I could not believe my eyes. Many of the guests do not believe me as I excitedly tell them that what they are seeing is the bird with the longest wingspan of any flying bird in the world, over 3 metres. Scale is almost impossible to gauge at sea, with nothing familiar to indicate size, and it is only when one glides effortlessly past just beyond your fingertips, or sails over the aft deck, that the immense size of these birds becomes apparent. This is a bird that might travel over 8,000km in a fortnight while hunting for food, or in one day cover over 1,200km of the wildest seas in the world, the roaring forties, furious fifties and screaming sixties. As it passes, the albatross seems to give you a look that makes you feel insignificant and utterly inadequate.

You cannot go to the Antarctic and not be impressed by the penguins.

On each of our trips we see over one million penguins and I answer as many questions about them. I spend a good deal of time reminding people that while they look cute, clumsy and comical to us, what we are looking at is a creature that spends as much as 80% of its life in the sea and is forced onto land to breed and moult. Definitely a fish out of water, if you know what I mean!

A visit to a king penguin colony on South Georgia is always a highlight for me.

While there I have been privileged to witness one of the most amazing sights in the natural world: to stand on a hill at Andrews Bay in South Georgia overlooking a quarter of a million king penguins on a glacial outwash plain is truly breathtaking and mind-blowing. It is like a scene from a sci-fi metropolis, looking down on the sights, sounds and smells of an alien world that stretches to the foot of distant mountains.

Amongst the throng are strange looking birds that the early explorers called woolly penguins because of their thick wool-like coats. They are, in fact, young king penguins and take the longest time of any bird to fledge, up to 16 months, and so need their thick coats of down and a layer of fat to see them through an Antarctic winter before they can go to sea for the first time. They are very inquisitive and if you sit down you will soon be approached by them looking at you as if to say ‘you are one funny looking penguin’.

It is no coincidence that on our voyages we cross the paths taken by Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean on their epic journey to rescue themselves and the crew of the Endurance. Every time I listen to our ship’s historian recount the heroic deeds of these men I shake my head in disbelief, still finding it very hard to accept that the accounts of all they did are true, especially once you have seen the Mordor-like jagged peaks of South Georgia, which they crossed in a tiny boat after sailing 1,300km in 17 days across an ocean feared by sailors the world over, and the tiny strip of barren shore on desolate Elephant Island where their comrades endured unimaginable hardships for 105 days clinging to the slim hope that they would be rescued.

This season I go to land at Point Wilde, a very memorable highlight for me, making this amazing story of hope and triumph, in the face of almost impossible odds, more real to me. Such is the weather and the seas in this area, even in the height of the Antarctic summer, that they say you have a one-in-ten chance of landing at Point Wilde, and for one of our team it was his first time landing there in 20 years.

Back at home, I try to use my experiences to teach school children in Ireland about the amazing beauty of our fragile planet and our duty to look after it.

* Jim Wilson/www.irishwildlife.net

* To see more of Jim’s Antarcticimages check out:www.flickr.com/photos/wilsonjim/