Birding down below
Of the six remaining penguin species on my checklist, 4 of them might solely be discovered on New Zealand and Australia’s Subantarctic Islands. Whereas dozens of cruise operators shuttle friends to and from the Antarctic Peninsula, far fewer expedition corporations go to the “Subs,” as the islands are known as. In reality, solely Heritage Expeditions visits all six island subgroups: the Snares, the Auckland Islands, Campbell Island, the Antipodes, and the Bounty Islands, all administered by New Zealand, plus Australia’s Macquarie.
While Heritage operates varied itineraries in the Subs, one in explicit caught my consideration: Birding Down Under, the most complete itinerary that even included the extra northern Chatham Islands. I appropriately assumed {that a} birding-focused cruise would offer ample alternatives to see not solely my 4 remaining penguin species, but in addition all kinds of seabirds, together with up to 11 species of my spark fowl, the albatrosses. I packed up my binoculars and returned to New Zealand.
Departing from Bluff, we sailed south in a single day to the Snares. The cliff-lined North East Island may not be conducive to human landings, but it surely’s a wonderfully appropriate house for the resident Snares crested penguins. Though spicy seas prevented us from getting shut to the island in Zodiacs, it did not matter all that a lot for penguin sightings—rafts of penguins swam proper up to our ship.
Another in a single day leg introduced us to Enderby Island, a part of the Auckland Islands. To my shock, yellow-eyed penguins have been all over the place. Far much less skittish than their mainland brethren, these birds marched between the sea and their forested nests on penguin highways that crossed our climbing path. As I made my method by way of the tree line of the rata forest, a penguin emerged from its nest not various ft away from me, giving me a far nearer look than my earlier sightings.
The climate gods then blessed us with unbelievably good situations at Macquarie, offering us with two full days of penguin encounters. Macca is sort of like a miniature model of South Georgia, with an estimated inhabitants of some 4 million penguins between kings, royals, and my sixteenth species, the jap rockhopper. But right here, I fell in love with not solely the birds, but in addition the juvenile elephant seals known as “weaners,” as they’d simply been weaned from their moms. These sausage-like infants up to us with out worry, nudging our knees and imploring us with their large puppy-dog eyes.
On Campbell Island, I delighted in the delicate peeps of the Campbell teal, a flightless duck, in addition to courtship dances of the majestic southern royal albatross. And that is not to point out the completely breathtaking megaherbs, big wildflowers solely discovered in the Subs, that blanketed the panorama like the backyard of an alien world.
By the time I noticed the erect-crested penguin—my final penguin lifer of the journey and seventeenth species general—on the rocky shore of the Antipodes, it wasn’t solely the penguins that introduced me thrills. Across our fleet of Zodiacs, birders raised their binoculars to gaze in marvel in any respect the uncommon wildlife right here: the Antipodes and Reischek’s parakeet, the Antipodean albatross, and even the subantarctic fur seal.