How the Two of Us Ended Up On an Adventure In Antarctica

In early 2015 Pamelia and I decided to seize an extraordinary opportunity. We would join an expedition to the planet's largest, coldest, most remote wilderness led by Mark Carwardine, a British zoologist, conservationist, wildlife photographer and writer whom we had admired for more than 20 years.

No, these seemingly headless king penguins aren't the two of US, but they're among the many unforgettable sights that we would see in our voyage to the deep, deep, deep South.  (Feel free to invent a funny caption.)

The trip would begin October 30 on a Russian ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov. That scientific research vessel, chartered by One Ocean Expeditions, would take us from the world's southernmost city, Ushuaia, Argentina, at the tip of South America, to a succession of unique and amazing places: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the South Shetland Islands and Antarctica. We would be at sea and away from all distractions—no phones, no Internet—for 19 days. 

We didn't know at the time that during the trip we would twice battle hurricane-force winds and monster waves in Earth's roughest sea, the Southern Ocean. Or that we would have even closer encounters than we had imagined with hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals in settings almost too spectacular for words. Or that one of us would come home as a winner of an international photography competition. Or that Pamelia would invent a new art form involving penguins. Or that by journey's end people would break into applause at the very sight of the shirt I was wearing.

South Georgia would be one of the most dazzlingly beautiful spots we would visit, though every destination was stunning and some places were wild in more ways than one. 

Pamelia and others learned that the best way to get Antarctic wildlife to approach was to sit still and wait. That time of quiet watching brought other rewards, including insights into the animals' behavior and a deep sense of connection to the animals and the place. 

With a stellar cast of about 100 shipmates—including not just Mark Carwardine but also one of the world's 40 most influential nature and landscape photographers, a longtime editor of BBC Wildlife magazine, an ornithologist, a research entomologist, a primatologist, a cosmologist, a geophysicist and a wildlife filmmaker and former producer of David Attenborough's BBC documentaries, who would be shooting footage during the trip—we would venture into the realm of great explorers such as Capt. James Cook, the heroic Ernest Shackleton and history's most important naturalist, Charles Darwin. 

Little did the others know that Pamelia and I would be smuggling Charles Darwin onto the ship, but I will save that story for later.

So come along with us, our naturalists' notebooks and our cameras as we share this adventure at the Bottom of the World in a series of diary entries that will unfold before you in the days ahead and may change the way you view our planet.

Oh, the places you'll see.

—Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood

Dahlias

Pamelia's latest dahlia photos are the (pollen-coated) bee's knees, a term whose origin is generally attributed to either a 1920s American cartoonist with a knack for coining other nonsensical superlatives (such as the cat's pajamas) or to the shortening in Britain of Shakespeare's "the be-all and the end-all" line from Macbeth (a reference to the coming assassination of King Duncan) to the "Bs and Es," which eventually ended up as "the bee's knees."

Bees' knees—or legs, anyway—are pretty cool. The legs have six sections (as do other insects' legs), and there are pollen baskets on the tibia section that bees fill up when visiting flowers. The joint between the tibia and femur could qualify as a bee's knee, though I don't know if it's the bee-all and end-all. 
(photos by The Naturalist's Notebook's Pamelia Markwood)

Our Northeast Harbor Summer

Greetings to all friends of The Naturalist’s Notebook! We wanted you to know that we are planning a very different summer for 2015 at the Notebook.

Pamelia and I are taking a break from running two seven-day-a-week Naturalist’s Notebook spaces this season and instead will open only our Northeast Harbor site.

The Seal Harbor Notebook isn’t going away. We’ll continue to develop our nature installations in that 13.8-billion-year building for 2016 even as we focus on launching a spectrum of Notebook projects that we’ve been working on and are very excited about. (We’ll also be addressing some medical issues and traveling and I’ll be beginning my Sports Illustrated work on the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics.)

We’ll start our season around July 21 and be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week (closed Sunday and Monday), possibly six in August. We won’t run any workshops, but the Northeast Harbor Notebook will be filled with a new universe of fun, intelligence, interactions and shop-and-think installations to explore.

Pamelia and I had one of our most creative winters ever. We’ve done some sharp editing and begun the evolution of The Naturalist’s Notebook into its next phase, which will include a completely redesigned website (the two of us are having a blast building it ourselves) that will be the surprise-filled, interactive, 365-days-a-year hub of our unique 13.8-billion-year exploration of nature. We want to make the virtual Notebook as original, intelligent and fun as the physical Notebook spaces are.

We look forward to seeing at least some of you this summer and we thank you for your years of sharing in our continuing Notebook adventures. We hope that you’ll follow our popular Facebook page and explore the new website when we unveil it in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned.

Have a great summer exploring the nature of your life with binoculars, a microscope, a camera, a field guide…and of course a pen or pencil and a notebook!

With 13.8 billion good wishes,

Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood