The great naturalist, biologist and writer Bernd Heinrich made a startling discovery this week while walking in the woods near his cabin in western Maine. Here's a Naturalist's Notebook video explaining the mystery in Bernd's words:
Come Along On a One-Day, Three-Stop Antarctic Wildlife Adventure
Dessert first, anyone? Never before had I wolfed down freshly baked butterscotch-chip cookies and coffee for breakfast, but trust me, it's not an unpleasant way to begin a day in the Antarctic (or anywhere else, I suspect). It's also a rapid way to fuel up if it's 4 a.m. and you're in a hurry to pull on boots, gloves, a hat and four layers of warm clothing and climb into a Zodiac boat for the first of three—three!—expeditions in the same day at major bird and seal breeding grounds on the remote, remarkable wonder of the world that is South Georgia Island.
We arrived at Salisbury Plain on South Georgia Island in time to watch the Sun rise over a vast expanse of king penguins and elephant and fur seals.
Those of you who already have been following our three-week trip to Antarctica aboard the Russian oceanographic vessel the Akademik Sergey Vavilov (and if you haven't been following, please feel free to scroll down or look at the index on the right to find earlier posts) have seen amazing photos from Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, the open ocean and parts of South Georgia Island. Prepare for more.
On this day Pamelia and I and our shipmates would wander through the beautiful landscapes, wildly changing weather and extraordinary wildlife at Salisbury Plain, Prion Island and Elsehul, three of the gems of South Georgia Island. We would see a total of 25 animal species, including four types of albatrosses, three kinds of seals, and a trio of penguin varieties. It would be another day-of-a-lifetime, of which this trip had provided several already. I will let the pictures below tell the story.
The king penguins and their brown, fluffy chicks filled the plain around us in every direction on South Georgia Island's largest coastal plain.
Salisbury Plain is home to South Georgia's greatest king penguin colony. See our previous posts, below, for more on these regal, remarkable animals.
Waves of king penguins came ashore and joined the masses on the plain. The ocean is home to these penguins for most of their lives, during the months when they're not breeding or molting (as many of them were at this time).
Fur seals popped up between the clumps of tussock grass. I had learned the hard way about the aggressiveness of these seals (see our post "Don't Mess With a Fur Seal") and would hear several weeks later about a bloody encounter: A passenger on another Antarctic voyage soon after ours suffered a severed artery when bitten here at Salisbury Plain by a fur seal. The injury required the ship to rendezvous with a British Navy vessel at sea and transfer the man for emergency surgery in the Falkland Islands.
Southern giant petrels scouted the plain for prey, specifically penguin chicks.
The eyes and bill of the Southern giant petrel are equally striking. Note the tube on the bill, part of a system that seabirds have evolved over millions of years for excreting salt from the sea water that they drink.
Pamelia spent one-on-one time with certain king penguins for ink studies that she would paint later. We'll soon share more of those studies and her time-lapse videos of herself painting them.
Once again we felt we were standing in one of the most breathtaking places on Earth.
As many of you know, we've brought the young Charles Darwin back to life at The Naturalist's Notebook and he was with us, enjoying his first voyage to the Antarctic. He's been writing his own blog about his trip.
The weather took a dramatic shift as we prepared to board the Zodiacs and return to the ship for a brief rest before heading to our next landing site, Prion Island. It was still just 7 a.m.
Soon we were on the rough seas in a Zodiac again, this time bound for Prion Island, home to wandering albatrosses on the nest and—at long last—rare South Georgia pipits for Pamelia and me to see.
A male Southern elephant seal stood sentry along the narrowing channel we had to negotiate to reach Prion Island.
We caught our first good glimpse of a leopard seal—a species that can grow to more than 11 feet long and is second only to killer whales among Antarctic predators. He was resting and presumably waiting for a chance to devour one of the gentoo penguins that were nesting and swimming nearby.
We ascended an icy wooden observation walkway (the only such visitor trail we would encounter on our three-week Antarctic voyage) to get a look at the wandering albatrosses nesting in the tussock grass.
Wandering albatrosses are extraordinary birds. They have the largest wingspan of any avian species (up to 11-and-a-half feet) and can live for 50 years if not done in by getting snagged on baited longline fishing hooks, which kill about 100,000 albatrosses of all kinds each year.
The wandering albatrosses that we saw on the nests were seven-month-old juveniles. Our ship ornithologist, Simon Boyes, affectionately called this one Albert. Young Albert had been waiting for days for his parents—amazing long-distance flyers, as all albatrosses are—to return from a 3,100-mile flight to the waters off Brazil to gather food that they would regurgitate to feed him.
Wandering albatrosses flying along with a ship have always been thought of by sailors as a good omen—a mythology made famous by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the mariner shoots an albatross that has just led his ship to safety from an Antarctic ice jam. The mariner and his ship suffer the consequences. We don't believe in omens, but seeing Albert certainly felt like a lifetime moment of good fortune.
Nearly as thrilling as standing a few yards from a wandering albatross was finding and photographing a South Georgia pipit, a species that had been endangered by the invasive brown rats in South Georgia. (See our previous Antarctic post for more on the extreme efforts underway to eradicate the rats.) These pipits hover in the air before diving into the tussock grass to catch insects. I was able to watch this one wandering and hunting in the grass for several minutes.
After a few hours back on board the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, we embarked on our final expedition of the day, to Elsehul, home to breeding gentoo penguins, fur seals, gray-headed albatrosses and light-mantled albatrosses. And also a macaroni penguin colony—that grayish patch within the green on the mountainside.
Here's a (blurry) closeup of the colony. Macaroni penguins are closely related to rockhopper penguins and share the ability to climb up steep rocky hills to reach seemingly inaccessible spots like this.
Some of the macaroni penguins were swimming.
Pamelia and I were bundled up again the strong winds and pelting snow.
Fur seals were watching us. Often visitors are not allowed to go ashore at at Elsehul because the breeding male fur seals are too aggressive (or because the waves and weather make landings impossible). Throughout our time at Elsehul, we had to be extremely careful not to intrude on the fur seals' space—and there were a lot of them around, often blending in with the rocks.
We headed off on a rocky climb.
Seal (and skua and petrel and penguin?) bones littered the ground—so many of them that one of the expedition members, noted wildlife filmmaker Peter Bassett, later put together a comical mock horror film in which the nesting gentoo penguins were bloodthirsty killers responsible for turning Elsehul into a boneyard.
We were on our way through muck and tussock grass to see penguins and albatrosses.
We soon encountered more gentoo penguins stomping around with their webbed, peach-colored feet.
Gentoos are playful, long-tailed penguins and, at 30 inches, the third-tallest of all penguin species.
Yes, this gentoo's nest was made mostly of bones. Cue the horror music!
Most of the nests were made of mud and stones. Male and female gentoos take turns on the nests (which contain two eggs) for a month, trading places every one to three days.
A nest builder in action.
Sometimes it was hard to believe that we were on one of the world's most remote and wildlife-rich islands watching these amazing animals.
The penguins and fur seals shared some of the same ground, though the penguins quickly moved aside if a fur seal charged through.
The albatrosses were nesting on the cliffside ahead of us.
Our first look at a gray-headed albatross, a threatened species whose numbers are continuing to decline.
A nesting gray-headed albatross like this one lays one egg in a year. If the chick survives, its parents will take a year off before breeding again. In that year, these remarkable flyers might circle the globe more than once.
I had seen a light-mantled albatross once before on the trip (see earlier post), but not this close.
Beautiful.
As we started to make our way back through the nesting gentoos, the fur seals again watched us and sometimes rumbled threateningly in our direction.
This shot gives a feel for the density of gentoo nests we saw.
There's a glimpse of that long tail, a distinguishing trait of not just gentoos but also two other types of penguins (chinstraps and adelies).
On the Zodiac ride back to the ship, we again watched the swimming macaroni penguins and steered close to short to revisit their hillside colony.
By dinner time on this mid-November Monday at the bottom of the world, Pamelia and I were back on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, once again energized and exhausted and exhilarated. We had been phenomenally fortunate over the previous few days, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the One Ocean Expedition team and the Russian captain and crew. Visitors to South Georgia Island—and there aren't that many of them—sometimes are able to go ashore only once or twice (or not at all) because of waves, weather and breeding-season restrictions. We had gone ashore at an unheard-of seven spots on the island. Seven. All of them unforgettable.
Let by Mark Carwardine, the renowned British wildlife photographer, zoologist, conservationist and writer who had set up this entire trip, we and our fellow adventurers raised glasses of champagne in a toast to all we had seen. And to the final, crowning destination ahead.
"Next stop, Antarctica," said Mark. . —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Weaned elephant seals (affectionally known as weaners) would be waiting for us on the beach at both Grytviken and, in the case of this one, Jason Harbor.
Antarctic Adventures (Cont.): Grytviken and Jason Harbor
Mornings in the Antarctic do not typically begin with rats, reindeer, whale slaughter and whiskey—but this was no ordinary day.
A week and a half into our voyage from South America to Antarctica, Pamelia and I were preparing to go ashore at two vastly different spots on remote and wildlife-rich South Georgia Island. The morning stop was Grytviken, site of a rusting, abandoned whaling station, a small history museum and the grave of famed explorer Ernest Shackleton. The afternoon would take us ashore at Jason Harbor, one of the most interesting and beautiful landscapes we would see on our three-week journey.
But first we learned about rats.
The kettle-pond bog landscape at Jason Harbor offered endless opportunities to explore.
A lecture on board the Akademik Sergei Vavilov laid out a tale of invasive species dating back at least a century. Brown rats arrived on South Georgia either on explorer James Cook's ship in 1775 or later on a whaling or sealing vessel and ever since then have wreaked havoc on ground-nesting birds, particularly the South Georgia pipit and the South Georgia pintail duck. Expanding herds of reindeer—brought in by Norwegian whalers in the early 1900s as a source of food—compounded the problem by eating tussock grass needed for bird nesting and otherwise damaging the environment.
Unlike most invasive-species stories, this one seems on track for a happy ending. The South Georgia Heritage Trust launched a multiyear project to rid the island of rats using poison pellets dropped by helicopter. That program has worked so well—with minimal impact on birds that eat rats—that other invasive-species-plagued islands around the world want to emulate it. Meanwhile, the reindeer were culled by more traditional hunting. The populations of South Georgia pipits and South Georgia pintail ducks are already increasing, and Pamelia and I hoped to see both.
We learned in the lecture that the pipit is one of South Georgia's two endemic bird species.
Because of South Georgia's tricky winds, top helicopter pilots from New Zealand came in to fly the choppers and drop the pellets on a carefully calculated grid.
We wouldn't have to wait long. A short Zodiac ride took us ashore at Grytviken for a morning that combined history and animals—some of them alive, some of them stuffed, some of them (the whales) shown in photos being harpooned, dragged onto the beach, carved up and boiled down. It served as an important reminder of what happened in those rusty buildings in the first half of the 20th century to more than 100,000 highly intelligent, sensitive, social mammals.
Between 1904 and 1965, the whaling complex at Grytviken killed and "processed" at least 30,000 (I've seen numbers closer to 60,000) whales, reducing them to commercial products such as oil, meat, food-additive powder and even glycerine for World War I and WWII explosives. The total slaughtered by whalers based at South Georgia's various stations totaled 175,000, according to zoologist Mark Carwardine, our trip organizer, who's a leading whale expert.
As soon as we landed, we saw a Southern giant petrel eating the ghoulish remains of a young seal.
A few elephant seals relaxed in patches of snow.
The graves of Ernest Shackleton and several others are fenced off but open to visitors.
In keeping with the tradition of toasting Shackleton at his grave, a member of our crew welcomed us with a bottle of whiskey.
We were given the option of sharing the whiskey with the late Shackleton rather than drinking it ourselves. I chose to share.
Our ship historian, Katie Murray, who earlier had given us a lecture on the astounding story of how Shackleton and his crew on the Endurance survived after their ship was locked in (and crushed by) Antarctic ice, added a few final words before we toasted.
Pamelia took a panoramic shot of some of the Vavilov explorers by the grave. Clouds were rolling in, and cold rain was about to start falling.
We saw our first group of South Georgia pintail ducks off to the side of Shackleton's grave. These pintails are small ducks which mate for life and nest in the tussock grass. Their numbers were decimated by hunting when the whalers arrived on South Georgia, but have climbed some since the whaling stations closed in the 1960s.
These are pressure cookers that were part of the station's "blubber cookery." Read the sign if you can for a further explanation of how a living being was turned into industrial products.
The Grytviken station had a church, dorms, a mess hall and even an athletic field on which teams from rival whaling station played soccer matches.
Less than a century ago, this hulk was a whaling vessel. Note the harpoon cannon on the bow. The harpoons had explosive tips designed to blow up inside the whale's head and kill the mammal, if the gunner's aim was good enough.
Whaling and whalers have often been glorified in literature and history, but from today's perspective there seems little glory in the slaughter of highly evolved animals—mammal cousins of ours, known to live as long or longer than we do and to remain close to their family members. Yes, the whalers were tough men (in some cases racist ones, to judge from the Grytviken museum's fascinating installation on the treatment of black Africans brought in to toil at the station). But their brutal work brought some whale species to the brink of extinction in the Southern Ocean and seriously affected world whale populations.
One member of our expedition said that her father had been based at Grytviken as a young engineer and that he was horrified by the wanton killing of whales that went on even after demand for whale products had virtually disappeared. The experience left such an impact on him that he went on to work on environmental projects such as research into declining albatross numbers and the link to long-line fishing.
(I should note that my 88-year-old father later told me that the factory he worked in used whale oil in honing machine tools; a bit of abrasive would be added to the top-quality oil for the last, finest honing. What happened when whale oil was no longer available, I asked him. "We used Crisco," he said.)
With the cold rain falling on us as we wandered among the rusted relics, a few in our group joked that the whaling station might better be called "Grim-viken." It would indeed be the most somber and sobering stop on our voyage, but one that we would never forget.
I took one last look around the station before heading inside.
Grytviken has the only post office on South Georgia, so we all stopped in to send postcards or buy unique stamps.
Pamelia checked out the albatross and other specimens in the museum.
We were glad to get back to the Sergey Vavilov to dry off and warm up. And as so often happened in our travels in the Antarctic, the weather soon changed dramatically. Our afternoon at Jason Harbor could not have been more beautiful—or a better antidote to the grim reality of Grytviken.
Welcome to Jason Harbor.
The clumps of tussock grass were a wild backdrop for the beachful of elephant seals.
After the hundreds of thousands of king penguins we had seen earlier on South Georgia, this lone one seemed dramatic in a different way.
The mossy landscape was dotted with kettle pools.
Pairs of South Georgia pintail ducks (which mate for life) fed in the boggy grass.
A gentoo penguin explored the beach...
...and met up with a king penguin cousin.
Pamelia studied the gentoos as inspiration for a sumo ink study that she would soon do back on the ship as part of her time-lapse penguin series.
Pamelia roamed back to a snowy hillside on which a cluster of penguins were hanging out. On the way, she and I saw...
...stunningly beautiful, graceful Antarctic terns. They closely resemble Arctic terns but don't migrate as far. Arctic terns fly from Arctic to Antarctic and back each year, while their Antarctic cousins generally don't go farther north than the coast of South America—still no small feat. We couldn't stop watching them.
The terns hovered momentarily before diving to feed by the kettle pools.
The young seals again studied us and eagerly approached us. In one case, when an expedition member lay on the ground, a young seal came over and laid on top of her as a pet dog or cat might.
By day's end Pamelia and I were tired but elated. We shared dinner with an expedition member from the Isle of Man, a self-governing entity located between England and Ireland—never a dull conversation on this ship!—and then learned that tomorrow's wakeup call would come at 4 a.m. No problem. We would visit three more amazing spots on South Georgia Island, including Salisbury Cove, a haven for seals and penguins; Prion Island, home to nesting wandering albatrosses and those rare South Georgia pipits that we had yet to see; and Elsehul, a place that would turn out to be as moody and memorable as its Lord of the Rings-sounding name might suggest.
Off to bed we went, eager for a new day in an extraordinary adventure that just kept getting better. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Bats at the Mine Hill Reserve
Circumstances have been keeping Pamelia, Rocky and me away from home this winter, but not from exploring—in this case the Mine Hill Reserve in Roxbury, Connecticut. The abandoned iron-mine shafts there have become one of the state's largest bat hibernation sites.
This mine shaft is caged in to keep people out but allow bats to come and go freely.
Though white-nose syndrome (a disease caused by a deadly fungus) has devasted bat populations in 25 states and five Canadian provinces since it first appeared in New York State in February 2006, Mine Hill's tunnels still host thousands of little brown, big brown, northern long-eared and pipistrelle bats (see photos below) in a dark, moist, 50- to 55-degree environment from fall to spring. Mine Hill is what biologists call a hibernaculum, or a place to hibernate. Roxbury has protected it through its highly successful land trust.
Little brown bats belong to a genus called Myotis, meaning "mouse-eared bat." They're sometimes known as little brown myotises. Their population has been hit hard from white-nose syndrome.
Big brown bats are one of the bat species that catch insects with their wing membranes and then shovel the insects into their mouths.
Northern long-eared bats are now listed as a threatened species because of the impact of white-nose syndrome.
The pipipstrelle is a small bat that can eat as many as 3,000 insects in a night.
Scientists have made progress in finding a way to combat white-nose syndrome, but bat numbers continue to shrink. Too many humans still think of bats as scary rather than magnificent, as threats rather than threatened. Bats control insect populations naturally, unlike insecticides, and they're mammals, like us. In fact, they've been around in their present form longer than we have; the oldest bat fossils date back more than 50 million years.
The history of Mine Hill is interesting too. In Mine Hill's heyday, in the mid-19th century, iron was extracted from the mineral siderite (the rock on the far left in Pamelia's hand in the photo below) by immigrant workers from Europe. The mine was later a source of granite, some of which was used on the 59th St. Bridge and Grand Central in New York.
These days Mine Hill's trails, groves of mountain laurel and impressive rock formations attract hikers, nature lovers and history buffs. As you can learn from its extremely well-done informational signage, Mine Hill is fascinating place for humans as well as bats.
The siderite (far left) was a source of Mine Hill's iron.
Rocky and I checked out some of the rock formations.
Pamelia and I enjoyed Mine Hill's longest hiking trail.
Rocky did too.
Have you visited an interesting nature reserve or park recently? Or—perhaps more important—seen any bats in the last year?
From Our Mailbag...
Following our latest Facebook posts on bobcats, off-course migrant birds showing up far outside their normal geographic range (including a black-throated sparrow photographed far up the coast of Maine), long-tailed-ducks, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff in Oregon and other subjects, our virtual mailbag overflowed this week with more than 1,000 of your comments and contributions (thank you—keep them coming!). Many of you sent photos of bobcats and birds you've seen, and artist Laurie Rothberg shared a watercolor she painted based on our northern-harrier photo from the Malheur refuge. Among the bird sightings you reported were a horned lark and a mountain chickadee, which a lot of people have never seen, so I'm putting up shots of them below. Enjoy!
(The horned lark was photographed in South Dakota by Kathy Zimmerman; the mountain chickadee shot was taken in New Mexico by an unnamed photographer and shared on Wikipedia.)
Feel free to like The Naturalist's Notebook page on Facebook if you enjoy our blog and Facebook posts!
Here are Laurie Rothberg's northern harrier painting...
...and the photo that inspired it. We took this picture at the visitors' center at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Kathy Zimmerman's horned lark photo, taken in South Dakota.
A mountain chickadee photographed in New Mexico.
Malheur Wildlife Refuge, the Militia and the Audubon Society
Today (Jan. 5) is the 111th birthday of the National Audubon Society. It is a day to celebrate birds and efforts to protect them and their habitats in the face of continuing threats, most recently from anti-government militia members who would like to see at least one national wildlife refuge dismantled.
A greater white-fronted goose specimen Pamelia photographed at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge nature museum in southeastern Oregon.
Pamelia and I photographed the four species shown here—a greater white-fronted goose, a northern harrier, a western tanager and a horned grebe—and many others at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2010. At the time we were doing reporting for a magazine story on the Pacific Flyway bird migration. In the course of writing that piece we saw that the network of national wildlife refuges in the western U.S. is essential to the annual migration of tens of millions of avian species, especially water birds.
The Malheur refuge was established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 to help protect species such as great egrets, which, along with many other large birds, had nearly been wiped out over the previous two decades to provide feathers for women's hats. That same slaughter had prompted the founding in 1896 of the first Audubon chapter, in Massachusetts, and had led to the 1905 murder by egret poachers in the Everglades of Guy Bradley (see photo below), a famously courageous game warden linked to the Florida Audubon chapter.
Feathered hats were so fashionable at the turn of the 20th century that millions of birds were killed to provide plumage for them.
These are great egrets, a species brought to the verge of extinction by the craze for those fashionable hats.
A northern harrier at the Malheur refuge museum.
The refuge has a driving route for bird-watching visitors.
A western tanager specimen, again from the Malheur refuge display.
A horned grebe.
At the Malheur refuge we saw Canada geese and a variety of other waterfowl, wading birds and raptors.
The Malheur refuge, a key stop for migrating Pacific Flyway birds, was already under assault from carp—introduced into Malheur Lake in the 1920s as a food source for local residents, but now an environmental nightmare that has eaten the insects, plants and fish eggs needed by birds—even before this week's news that it has been taken over by armed militia. One militia member, Ammon Bundy, complained to CNN that the refuge sat on land that could have been used for ranches and mining. "This refuge—it has been destructive to the people of the county and the people of the area," said Bundy.
That's not exactly a happy birthday message for the Audubon Society, but it's a reminder why organizations such as Audubon—and the voices of everyone willing to stand up for wildlife and the habitat it needs to survive, including the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—are as important as ever. —Craig Neff and Pamelia Markwood
Guy Bradley, now an icon in conservation, was just 35 when an egret poacher in Florida shot and killed him.