Black King penguin next to normal King penguin

Fellow traveler and National Geographic Traveler contributing editor Andrew Evans posted a photo of the melanistic penguin on his blog, which led to another post in the Intelligent Travel blog, and from there it seems to have spiraled into a major news story.

So, to help prove that Andrew’s photo was not an anomaly, below are a few more photos of the Black Penguin.

Black Penguin in the foreground with a regular King penguin in the background

The Black Penguin

Larger versions of the above images, along with additional photos can be found on Krystyana’s Flickr pages.

There’s a beautiful full moon out tonight as well, and now that we’re in safe harbor, only minor motion. Very nice after two days of constant rolling and rocking.

The GPS track for the last couple of days is below.

The light wasn’t great – it was already quite dark as far as our cameras were concerned, but that didn’t prevent us from being delighted at seeing a number of small colonies of Macaroni penguins. Better yet, there was constant Macaroni penguin traffic off and on small cliffs as the penguins leaped into the water to go feed, and fed penguins leaped out to feed their chicks.

Macaroni penguins plunging into the ocean

The Macaroni penguin in the foreground has just leaped out of the water and appears suspended in mid-air

The landscape in Hercules Bay was also stunning, with amazing rock formations showing evidence of the strong forces which shaped South Georgia eons ago.

Here the rock striations are colored by lichen, algae, and mosses

And lest we forget, the glaciers and snows atop South Georgia’s impressive mountains also produce their own form of terrain change.

Snow melt creates this impressive cascading series of waterfalls at Hercules Bay

All in all, a very pleasant afternoon in the middle of a beautiful nowhere.

More photos available on my Flickr pages.

The view of the beach at Fortuna Bay from our balcony in the morning

As we anchored in Fortuna Bay, on the island of South Georgia, we took in this environment, so different from what we had come to believe as the sole reality of penguin and seal existence. From our balcony, we could see green, grassy plains extending from the shore, and liberally dotted with Antarctic fur seals, wandering King penguins, and even reindeer. The white specks that were King penguins stretched out even into the foot hills a mile or more from shore (and even further than that as we later observed).

We had already seen penguins climbing to nest at stupendous heights, but not with all the greenery involved as well.

The plains at Fortuna Bay are covered with King penguins and Antarctic fur seals

Upon landing on shore, we also discovered the skeleton of a leopard seal – dried out, leaving only leathery skin, bones, and teeth. Yet another species of critter to dot the landscape.

Close-up of the desiccated skull of a leopard seal we found on the beach

As we wandered inland, for well over a mile, to find the large King penguin colony (7,000 nesting pairs, we were told) at Fortuna Bay, we had to continually dodge around fur seals and King penguins wandering about – mostly to or from the colony.

Three Stages of King Penguins - Adult, juvenile with no fuzz, chick losing fuzz

The King penguins have cute little tails

The fur seals were especially interesting – there were a lot of aggressive young males of all ages that would first growl at us and then charge. However we just stood our ground, stared them down, and occasionally told them to stop in a stern voice, and that took care of the problem. Much like dogs in that way. The fur seal pups, though, were just too cute when they tried the whole growling thing, and would always stop charging and then sulk off when we told them how adorable and cute they were. I hope they survive the emasculation of our comments.

One of the countless fur seal pups on the plain

The King penguin colony we ultimately saw was not nearly as impressive as the one back at Salisbury Plain, but we were interested to see that surrounding the colony were several herds of reindeer, apparently unperturbed by our presence. And seeing the penguins wandering near the reindeer gave the scene a rather surreal atmosphere.

A reindeer buck with tatters of velvet on his antlers - and King penguin in the foreground

As we slowly wandered back to the shore we spent time communing with the King penguins there as they exited and entered the ocean. King penguins feed exclusively in the ocean, and thus they spend a lot of their time in the water. But their chicks are in the various small colonies spread out across the hills and plains, so they spend a lot of time walking back and forth as well.

King penguins charge into the surf

We set off for our Zodiacs, and the penguins around us wandered off to whatever engagements faced them.

A lone King penguin leaves tracks in the sand after exiting the water

Many more photos are available on my Flickr pages.

It was snowing, it was cold, and we just were not feeling quite ambitious enough for such exertion so we instead opted to take the ship over to Stromness.

The former whaling station at Stromness

When we arrived at Stromness, Captain Kruse surprised us by running the National Geographic Explorer aground into the soft sand near the beach. This made for a very short trip to shore by Zodiac. The other surprise awaiting us were hundreds of fur seals on the beach, and more particularly, in the water. In fact, one particular area of the surf we could see from our balcony was literally alive with Antarctic fur seals, playing in the water.

Masses of fur seals observe us and the ship with only minor curiosity

It was snowing and raining quite strongly, but we needed to check out these fur seals for ourselves.

The seas are alive with the sounds of playing fur seals

Once on land we discovered the fur seals were not particularly interested in us, and even the few older male fur seals didn’t waste energy on trying to intimidate us with growling and charging like we had experienced elsewhere on this trip.

Fur seals like body surfing as much as we do, but also in really cold water

Most of the fur seals were young pups – thoroughly adorable and curious, and readily approached us to check us out (and then ignore us when we proved to not be interesting enough).

Bas checks out his temporary fur seal pup companion while Linda videos him

Other critters were present too, including some elephant seals – one of whom came close enough to decide we were not something it wanted to spend more time with.

An elephant seal juvenile came in for a look at us, but ended up leaving again

We also found two species of penguins – Gentoos and Kings. Watching the interchange between the seal fur pups and penguins was comical, with the fur seal pups being playful and the penguins being a bit disconcerted and huffy about the whole thing.

This Gentoo penguin appeared a little out of place when it came out of the water and found itself surrounded by curious fur seal pups

We spent a couple of hours on shore, completely soaked, but also very happy we had visited, and even happier we had not done the long hike.

Our King penguin greeting committee wishes us a good journey to our next stop in South Georgia

More photos and larger version of those above can be found on my Flickr pages.

It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and we took lots of photos of macaroni penguins and other birds. Also got to hear glacial ice crackling as it melted.

We left Elsehul during lunch, and stopped for a bit at Trinity Island, the second to last bit of land considered to be South Georgia.

We’re now on our way to the town of Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Should be arriving very late on Sunday, or early on Monday morning. Two days at sea should mean lots of photo editing time, and thus a bunch of blog posts, providing the seas don’t get too rough (scant chance of that though).

And providing my computer works. My Alienware M17x notebook stopped being able to read from one of the two memory slots on the motherboard at noon today, so I’m running at half RAM (and noticeably slower).

I should also mention that my GPS batteries died leaving Right Whale Harbour (unbeknown to me), so the cross country track on the GPS map below is incorrect. The ship did not cross the mountains, but instead followed the coast to get to Elsehul. In case you were wondering. GPS batteries have been replaced, but from this point forward the track will probably be pretty darned boring – a nearly straight line for 900 or so miles. Next update on Monday for GPS.