How an Antarctic cruise passenger’s illness led to the discovery of a new penguin colony

Sarah Knapton
Fri, February 2, 2024 

The ship came across a colony of chinstrap penguins at Diaz Rock

 - Alamy, Sarak Knapton


The remote Antarctic island of Diaz Rock should have been deserted, yet when penguin experts turned their binoculars on the outcrop, tiny eyes were looking back. Guarding their ascetic stone nests there emerged a completely undiscovered colony of chinstrap penguins, the endearing little species which appears to have a King’s Guard bearskin strap tattooed onto its face. The rocky refuge is Antarctica’s newest penguin colony discovered to date, and lies close to Astrolabe Island and the fearsome volcanic extrusion of steep peaks known as the Dragon’s Teeth.

Boats sailing between the stone fangs are said to have “flossed” the island. Yet the new colony was not discovered by a dedicated scientific expedition, or satellite imagery, but when the Viking Octantis cruise ship I was sailing on was forced to alter her course after a passenger became desperately ill.

Originally, the itinerary should have taken us to Damoy Point, a former transfer station for the British Antarctic Survey, as well as Mikkelsen Harbour, once a popular refuge for whalers caught out by the treacherous katabatic winds. But with a critically ill patient on board, the schedule was ripped up and Captain Jorgen Cardestig made a mercy dash for the nearest airport at King George Island in the South Shetlands for an emergency evacuation to Chile.

The passenger was air-lifted to hospital successfully, but with a day’s sailing lost, the voyage had to be rerouted from the Gerlache Strait towards the Weddell Sea, leaving the ship sailing into waters unknown not only to the passengers, but also most of the crew. Here was an opportunity for real off-plan exploration, and by a stroke of good fortune, the ship was carrying penguin counters Hayley Charlton-Howard and Dr Mairi Hilton from the Antarctic conservation group Oceanites.

Viking is known for its commitment to science, allowing a large number of researchers to tag along on its Antarctic voyages, and recently endowing a chair at the University of Cambridge.

Under the new itinerary, the Octantis was now bound for Astrolabe Island, a three-mile-wide volcanic mass lying in the Bransfield Strait, with a colony of chinstrap penguins that had not been surveyed since 1987.

Sarah Knapton journeyed to Antarctica with Viking Cruises

There are thought to be around 1.6 million pairs of chinstraps on the Antarctic Peninsula, but their numbers are falling by 1.1 per cent per year, largely as a result of fewer krill – their main food source – due to climate change and sea ice retreat.

Previous counts had found more than 3,000 nesting chinstrap penguins on Astrolabe but the counters were keen to find out how they were fairing. So, on a sunny January morning, with calm seas and cerulean skies, we struggled into our waterproofs and life jackets and took a rigid inflatable boat to the island.

Dozing Weddell seals on the shore opened one eye to glance lazily at us, before resuming their slumber. Petrels, skuas and snowy sheathbills squawked overhead. And there, on the rocks, were thousands of chinstrap penguins, camped on steep slopes with their fluffy chicks, many having climbed up to vertiginous and seemingly uninhabitable cliff edges to nest.

Sarah discovered more than expected during her Antarctica cruise - Sarah Knapton

The colony was full to bursting and appeared to be thriving. But it was not Astrolabe that was causing excitement among the penguin counters, but nearby Diaz Rock. Penguins are often smelt before they are seen, but this time it was the pinkish hue of their guano, rather than its cloying stench, that alerted the Oceantisis team to a new site.

“We went around the back of the island to fly the drone and we thought ‘that looks like it’s covered in some suspiciously pink stains’,” said Dr Hilton, “That’s a tell-tale sign penguins are nearby.

“When we first got there, we only could see cormorants so we were a little bit disappointed. We got the binoculars and had a closer look. And it turned out that there were in fact some chinstraps there, we think between about 40 and 50 chinstrap penguin nests. So, that’s a brand new colony for us.”

She added: “Finding a penguin colony only happens once every three or four years. So this is a really big privilege for us to be able to do that. That was a really good day.”

It is a theme of Antarctica that adversity and discovery tend to go hand in hand, with tragedy written into the landscape. We sailed close to Wiencke Island in the Gerlache Strait, named in honour of Carl August Wiencke, a German seaman swept to his death on Adrien de Gerlache’s Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899.

We visited Paulet Island, another major penguin colony and where the Swedish Antarctic Expedition was stranded for the winter in 1903. Remains of their stone cabin are still visible as well as a cairn built at the highest point to attract the attention of rescuers.

In 1915, Ernest Shackleton aimed for the island after the Endurance sank in Weddell Sea, hoping to use stores left behind by the Swedish crew, but drifted too far east.

Not far away is Danco Island, commemorating Emile Danco who died of a heart condition after being forced to endure the long Antarctica winter trapped in the pack ice with his Belgica crew mates. On that expedition, penguins were clubbed to death and eaten to stave off scurvy during the sunless months, kept on leashes as pets, and even slung over the side of the Belgica as feathery fenders, to prevent ice floes grating against the wooden hull.

Today, under the Antarctic Treaty, all 18 species of penguins are legally protected and it is unlawful to hunt them, collect their eggs or interfere with the birds in any way.

On our trip alone we saw more than 300,000, the seas often writhing in a moving penguin soup, as the animals arced in and out of the water in a trait known as porpoising, a behaviour practised by dolphins and whales, but not, curiously, porpoises.

As well as chinstraps, there are two other species of penguin on the Antarctic peninsula, including the easily-spooked Adélies that will often flee en masse like panicked maître-des. The gentoos give off a more insouciant air, except when their chicks are terrorised by raiding skuas, when they will stretch out their necks to the sky and scream in fury.

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) insists on strict rules for landing parties, and every stray cat hair was plucked from our clothing before we left the ship and we were thoroughly hosed down on our return. Passengers are banned from sitting or kneeling on land and are instructed to keep 5 metres clear of the wildlife, a tricky request when so many curious penguins are keen for a closer look.

It is a far cry from the 1980s when cruise passengers were encouraged to play golf off the side of Antarctic cruise ships, and shoot clay pigeons. But despite the measures many penguins are still declining, and avian flu has now reached the region, leading to fears that tourist visits to the Antarctic will only spread disease further and exacerbate the declines.

Visitors to the continent have now reached 100,000 a year and there is a constant tension between conservation and tourism. Researchers on board the Viking ships are pragmatic about the influx. Carrying out science at the end of the world is expensive and difficult, and hitching a ride is the only way many of them can access the area.

On board the Octantis, scientists have access to state-of-the-art wet labs, and are repurposing the ship’s former Covid PCR testing lab to run genetic tests on phytoplankton to see if populations are changing as more freshwater floods into the area from glacial melting.

Elsewhere, sonars are being fitted to the ships so they can map the seabed, providing crucial data on past glaciation, while Viking’s expedition ships are the only civilian vessels in the world which are designated official NOAA / the United State’s National Weather Service weather balloon stations.

Viking is also the first cruise line in the world to publish a scientific paper, after submarine passengers spotted the rare giant phantom jellyfish – a bizarre 30ft creature resembling a giant ribbon attached to a flying saucer.

Jason Hayden, the chief scientist on the Viking Octantis, said: “Having this opportunity to tag along with Viking Cruises is amazing, the funding that it would take for my lab to come with its own research vessel is near impossible.

“When people say, ‘hey this is a pristine environment and you should not go there’ I say there is something called a baseline study, and if you don’t know what the baseline is you don’t know if it’s been screwed up or not.

“It has to be done in a responsible way, which is what we do. Everyone who comes to Antarctica knows how special it is, and the more people who feel the place is special the more it will be protected.”

In such a remote location, getting a true picture of penguin numbers is difficult, and arguably, every extra eye helps. Just this week, the British Antarctic Survey announced that satellite images had shown four previously unknown emperor penguin breeding sites, including a site at Halley Bay which had been thought abandoned. Without our cruise, the world would not know about the new chinstrap colony. Who knows what other colonies are waiting to be found in the next bay.

King penguin swims hundreds of miles from Antarctic to show up on Australian beach

Namita Singh
Fri, February 2, 2024 


A king penguin was spotted at a south Australian beach, about hundreds of miles from its home in the Antarctic.

“We were up high on the beach. We stopped and it kept on walking up towards us," said Jeff Campbell, president of Friends of Shorebirds South East, which was doing a survey of bird population in Kingston South East when it encountered the penguin.

"Then it did some displays towards us and then did its really strange braying calls, putting its head back and then bowing to us and then it came really, really close to us. We didn’t go toward it; it came toward us,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as he theorised that the bird might have “never seen a human before”.

"It was a young bird. It’s come from a sub-Antarctic island like Heard Island or Macquarie Island and has landed here, so [it’s] probably never encountered a human before and didn’t know humans could be dangerous,” he told the outlet.

Though it was a surprise, Mr Campbell said, the long journey of penguins from was not unheard of. A king penguin was spotted at Port MacDonnell, near Mount Gambier about two decades ago, in 2004.

Dr Julie Mc Innes, from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, Ecology and Biodiversity, told the Guardian that it would have possibly come to the mainland “to moult” – a period when penguins shed all feathers.

It typically takes three to four weeks and often begins around February, according to New Zealand’s Yellow-eye Penguin Trust. “During the moult, because plumage is not waterproof and the body is not well insulated, they cannot go to sea to feed, and may lose three to four kg in weight.

“They are confined to shore as they wait for their old feather coat to be replaced,” read the organisation’s website.