Sheathbills!

Not the most glamorous of critters here, the snowy sheathbill is easily overlooked.  But they are quirky and often funny, and it's a riot to make fun of them, especially if Otter is around because he has a sick obsession with them.  He'll call them the "noble" sheathbill; we'll call them the shit chicken.  He'll rename Lover's Lane as Sheathbill Cove; we'll rename it Bar-bar Harbor.  In response to Bob's fake movie trailer, Humpbacks!, I put together this one:

Just Another Day at the Office...

Today I met Al Gore, Richard Branson and Ted Turner.  And I gave a tour of station to Tommy Lee Jones.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot ?

Penguinos

I've taken exactly zero pictures of penguins since I arrived at Palmer this year.  As a matter of fact, I've gone out of my way to avoid Torgersen Island altogether.  Years ago, I didn't understand a friend's reaction to penguins as "stinky, disgusting, and covered with shit."  But they're so cute and goofy I thought to myself.  Well, I suppose they're both, but once the novelty has worn off they're mostly stinky and covered with shit.  Still, I took a bunch of pictures last year that I meant to post and never quite got there, so here they are...

The birds and the bees:


The birders proffer a little wager each year called "Get Laid on Torgersen".  For a dollar, you get a day on the November calendar, and if the first egg appears on your day, you take the pot.  In early December they start to hatch.  This one had begun, and I hoped to see it finish, but apparently it needed a warm nap under mum's belly first:


A couple weeks later, and their little heads are popping out from beneath their parents' bellies.


Sometimes there are two:


Bet you didn't think a penguin could do this:


While Chris (aka C-Money, aka Coconuts) sat quietly taking pictures of the nesting adelies, his own gang of very curious gentoos waddled right up to have a look at him:


I guess I can't say that I'm completely over penguins.  I still have a good chuckle at them now and then; when they scurry up the road in town as the loader rounds the corner; when one finds itself on the pier and can't quite figure its way back to the water; when they misjudge a hop and flop over flapping; and I don't think I'll ever tire of them porpoising.  But going to Torgersen isn't what it used to be for me, unless the skuas are providing a good show.  And I definitely find myself routing for the predators.

The islands in general are losing that initial luster.  Though each unique, they're all just piles of rocks with a smattering of lychen and moss, and a splattering of guano.  I've found a few new things to do, but I won't talk about them here... yet.

I'm still excited by whale encounters.  Yesterday I went out with Kim on her circuitous sampling grid and saw more krill on the echo sounder than she has seen yet.  For five hours we motored back and forth in the boating area and beyond, in a large erratic swell that made it hard to even keep the boat straight (not to mention keep a meager lunch in my belly).  Several snow squalls pushed through, forcing us to navigate by GPS when the visibility was limited to only the ocean around us: an eerie feeling.  But we saw ten or more small pods of humpbacks feeding all around us.  I jumped several times when I heard the distinct sound of their exhale right next to me.  And for the first time, I saw them breaching.  Only a few times, and in the distance, but it was incredible and nearly unbelievable to see a creature of that size launch itself entirely into the air and come crashing down in a huge spray.  So, you know, it's not all bad.

But stepping back to that day last December, on the way home from Torgersen the sky had a bizarrely beautiful ceiling of mottled cloud:


Looking away from the sun, towards the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula:


Kim spied a solitary krill amongst the brash ice, and got so excited after she picked it up with an oar, that she fell over backwards into the boat:


Hard to imagine now, that a single krill would be so exciting, but there just weren't that many of them last year.

Whales for Christmas

On Friday morning the call went out that there were whales in the harbor.  This usually means that everyone stops what they're doing and takes a peek outside for a few minutes.  It being the eve of our holiday weekend though, Bob was gracious enough to allow two rec boats to load up and go whale watching for an hour or two.  And he even came along, which is quite a rare treat.

We motored out a quarter mile to the end of Bonaparte Point and sat watching as a pod of humpback whales fed.  We're required to keep our distance, and do so based on whether or not the animals are reacting to our presence.  Humpbacks really don't seem to mind a small floating object on the surface, so we can get reasonably close without influencing their behavior.  And sometimes, when we're lucky, they can be in an inquisitive mood.  By chance, this pod came closer and closer to our boat, until they were coming up right next to it, at which point curiosity got the better of them.  Pectoral fins broke the surface just feet from us as they swam on their sides to get a look at us.  Several times they dove directly under the boat and emerged in the middle of a barrel roll as they resurfaced on the other side.  A little unsettling, for some, especially when surrounded by multiple surfaced whales, all nearly within reach.  It was a truly amazing experience.

I took only pictures, and captured more orange coats than actual whales, but Bob put together a fun fake movie trailer that gives you a good idea of how close we actually were:  Humpbacks!

Which reminds me, we had a local film festival this week and I finally got all my timelapse videos looking the way I want them (almost) and entered a short film that you can watch here:  Antarctica: A Lapse in Time

Bob also put together a timelapse for the festival from the Palmer Station webcam.  It is from the day before dad visited and explains the canceled visit two days before.  It shows Arthur Harbor choc-a-block with ice, as a Kiwi would say, and then emptying completely in a northeasterly gale:  Gone in 45 Seconds

The ice blew back in again this Saturday night, along with an unseasonal (here) dusting of snow, making for a beautiful white Christmas, and perhaps the last shot at snowboarding for the year.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...  Meanwhile, back amongst the whales, Kim and Luke motored about in Mrs. Chippy, the krilling zodiac platform named after the carpenter's cat on Shackleton's Endurance expedition.  If you watched Luke's video from my last post (which you should, and check out his other videos too, especially "How to Say Goodbye in Antarctican"), you'll have seen that they caught a lot of krill and saw massive aggregations on the echo-sounder, which is basically a high-tech fish finder.  Kim will count and measure the krill she caught in order to verify the echo-sounder data.  Then she's hoping to correlate krill abundance with diurnal tide phase and penguin foraging radius.  I'm not even going to attempt an explanation, but maybe she will on her blog sometime: kimsantarctica.blogspot.com (but don't get your hopes up, she's as miserable at upkeep as I am).

Anyway, Kim and Luke brought a lot of krill home and put them in a tank in the aquarium.  I would have guessed that there were hundreds, but after helping to measure about two hundred krill, which was just a sub-sample of a sub-sample, I'm updating my guess to many thousands.  Here's what they look like:



They also caught a wee tiny baby ice fish in the net.  He was really cool looking, but unfortunately didn't last very long in the tank.  He found himself stuck against the filter at the outflow, and then he found himself in my belly.  Kim asked, "How was it?".  I responded, "A little fishy".  Har har.


So, that was Friday morning... On Friday afternoon we had our Christmas dinner.  Holiday meals here are much like they are at home, except that the table is a little bigger, and the conversation a little less polite.  We sat down to a huge feast, served home-style.  Plates were passed clockwise to avoid confusion, and they were filled with various meats and vegetables, curries, pastas, breads, and even lobster, all provided by our wonderful cooks, Marci and Francis.  The community members help too, of course.  Dave and Ted even smoked a pig that turned out amazing (I continued to savor it in various forms of leftovers for the next two days, Sunday's breakfast burrito being the best).  And as you can see, there was no shortage of wine:

The dessert table also spilleth'd over with truffles and brittles and cookies and fudges and other such delights.  Fran's yule log was an incredibly realistic centerpiece:

Kim made a traditional South African sweet again this year.  They are a braided, deep fried dough smothered in ginger syrup and they're flipping hectic, as Kim would say.

Not to be outdone (though I clearly was, despite my addition of the Swedish flag), I took my first stab at making pepparkakor, a spice cookie that I haven't had at Christmas time in ages.  Actually this was my first stab at making cookies, period, and aside from not rolling them out quite as thin as they should have been, they were quite good.

I'm steeling my nerves for a trial run at kroppkakor...