Counting one and a half million penguins.

I love approaching the South Sandwich Islands; they are such a mythical place. Each time, as they emerge slowly over the horizon, through a mist or snowfall, it anchors you to the fact that you are actually there. For the rest of the year, they might as well be a figment of your imagination. After all, it’s a fairly bonkers place to go to!

Zavodovski Island, classed as an ‘active volcano’ and degassing continually contains probably the largest aggregation of any large vertebrate species in the world. In other words, it’s bigger than all of the great migrations of Africa and it’s probably only swarms of locusts or swarms of krill that could scoop it for the record. There’s something like one and a half million Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, but since the last eruption in 2016, it hasn’t been properly counted. On a visit in 2020, we got close, but weren’t able to land, so we flew a drone from the yacht in a heaving seaway to get most , but not all of it surveyed.  I was pretty driven to complete this unfinished business and get some boots on the ground.

The challenges are great; it’s a stunning place to visit but notoriously problematic. There are no sheltered landing spots requiring a scramble up a steep and slippery cliff face just to get ashore. All the camping equipment and science paraphernalia has to be hauled up that cliff with a rope from the Zodiac while timing the surge and heave. There’s a nervousness and thrill to landing somewhere that so few people get to. I have had the privilege to visit many of the islands in the South Sandwich Island chain over the last 10 years, discovering  some of their secrets in terms of penguin numbers, population health and how these colonies react to eruptions. 

As Skip and Nicole emphasised in their blogs, getting on and off the island is tough, but was relatively straightforward with the system we had in place and some excellent Zodiac driving by Dion. I can also attest that the standard of cooking when Skip is tent-master equates to roughly two Michelin stars. I pity the other tents! 

Thanks to the Vinson of Antarctica crew and much detailed planning, we managed to get safely established and ‘dug in’ for 10 full days in January.  We left penguin camera traps overlooking the colony, flew the whole island with drones for an accurate census since the 2016 eruption.  We also put out 45 GLS (Geolocators; long term tracking devices) on penguins to understand where they go in winter. This is all linked to the  Marine Protected Area work of the South Georgia Government, aiming to continually enhance protection of the region, informed by the best science.

It was an unforgettable experience, a delight to live in the shadow of that volcano and experience life in the largest penguin colony on earth. It didn’t even rumble, it treated us very well and so once we achieved all we could, everything was lowered back over that same cliff into the Zodiac and then, once on board a major clean up with the yachts fire hose – both us and the equipment – after all, we had been living in and amongst the penguins.

It was time to run for cover to South Georgia, before the long haul back to Port Stanley. Zavodovski receded into myth again and waits for the next time we return and push back more of its secrets. I will miss all those penguins until that day.

Dr. Tom Hart

Department of Biological and Medical Sciences Oxford Brookes University

Tom Hart

Penguinologist