Cape Royds Part 1

(Re-reading this, I realized there were a bunch of grammatical errors, sorry!  I think I corrected most of them -- that's what I get for working late at night!)

Escaping out to Cape Royds for the morning was an extremely welcome distraction from working in the lab.  My adviser and I hoped to collect some water from Pony Lake to test out our analyses for the various methods we are using.  When we arrived, we realized sadly our plan would not work.  The lake, which showed open water in the pictures from the “penguin cam” during the previous day, was completely frozen over.  However, the trip was not completely a bust, since I still got a lay of the land for our future sampling trip to Cape Royds.

Also … there were penguins!  The colony of Adelie penguins at Cape Royds is composed of around 4,000 penguins and is the southernmost colony of penguins in the world!  At this point in the season, the male penguins are all tending to the nests and sitting on the eggs, while the females head the (now short) journey to the ice edge to get food.  While we were there, the wind was continually blowing with gusts greater than 30 knots!  The penguins sitting on the nests all turn so that they face into the wind.  At first I thought this was a bit odd; at least from the human standpoint, we tend to turn so our backs are to the wind.  However, as the helo pilot corrected, they probably don’t want the wind going the wrong way up their feathers!

The male Adelies all keeping their eggs warm

"What are you looking at?!"

Life is rough out there on the ice ... 

 

Lost eggs, now frozen

Although cold, it is quite beautiful

 Another view of the mountains behind the penguins.

An Adelie posing for Yo's picture

Later!

As Yo and I approached the penguin colony, a group of about 5 females came running up to see what we were up to.  They just waddled over to us, looked us over, decided we were not interesting enough and moved on!  

  

For the male penguins, everything is about finding the best rock!  The Adelie penguins make their nests out of rocks, so they are constantly readjusting the rocks and finding new ones.  The males occasionally sit up on their nests and flap their little wings, which is their way of showing off their beautiful rock nests.

Rearranging rocks in the perfect nest.

 An Adelie collecting rocks for the nest.  He (or she?) collected multiple rocks while we were watching, waddling back and forth again and again

The males also occasionally argue about their rocks.  One will steal a rock from another’s nest, which causes quite a racket.  The penguin who the rock originally belong to will start squawking and flapping his wings, which causes the thief to return with the same noise and displays.

Angry Penguins!!

 This is a short video of the penguins arguing over the rock 

We also took a trip out to Shackelton's hut, but I will have to continue about the hut in my next post!