Weeks ago, on our first day at sea, I spent two hours trying to get one decent photo of one black-browed albatross. In retrospect, that was not perhaps the wisest use of my time. This morning, on Steeple Jason Island, I spent an hour or so at a vantage point from which I could have pointed the camera randomly in any direction at all and still be 100% certain that it was pointing at an albatross. Or, more likely, a lot of albatrosses. We encountered a surfeit, a superabundance, an embarrassment of albatrosses: 159,000 breeding pairs, according to the last count (and by the time they'd finished counting there were probably half as many again...)
We did in fact see a few other creatures: striated caracaras, upland geese, prions: but it was almost impossible to photograph them because of all the albatrosses in the way.
This afternoon we were at Saunders Island: we landed on a broad, 2-mile long beach which would have been perfect for beach cricket, had it not been for the howling 40-knot sandstorm. In the slip cordon we had gentoo penguins, in the midwicket area there were Magellanic penguins, and at very very very long on (about a mile away) there was a large colony of of rockhopper penguins. Having fought our way through the gritty gusts (which bothered the penguins not a jot) we were pleased to find that the rockhopper penguin is a literal-minded beast: it's a penguin, and it hops on rocks. Jolly good.
